


Slow Match

by paperiuni



Series: Slow Match [1]
Category: Borgias - Ambiguous Fandom, The Borgias, The Borgias (2011)
Genre: Action, Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Drama, Gen, Historical Divergence, Historical References, M/M, Male-Female Friendship, Post-Canon, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-22
Updated: 2013-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-05 15:10:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 25,568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1095469
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperiuni/pseuds/paperiuni
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Micheletto wanders, Cesare conquers, and Lucrezia offers a timely intervention. Some ties are not easily severed, but neither can they stay unchanged. Set right after season 3 (and from there on out).</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Derelict

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sidewinder](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sidewinder/gifts).



> Since there was a timeline of sorts to follow, I've pilfered and borrowed from actual history, but also thrown out details (and whole events) and fudged dates whenever it suited the story better. Much like _The Borgias_ itself.
> 
> I wish you a happy holiday season, and hopefully this story will sweeten it, too!

  
_When love beckons to you, follow him,_  
 _though his ways are hard and steep._

_And when his wings enfold you yield to him,_  
 _though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you._

_And when he speaks to you believe in him,_  
 _though his voice may shatter your dreams_  
 _as the north wind lays waste the garden._

\-- Kahlil Gibran  


* * *

He walks the alleyways of Rome a ghost, cloaked in living flesh. Death is a frequent demand by those who hire him, but he is in no man's employ. Lord Borgia-- _il Valentino_ , as they now call him--showed him unstinting generosity. The coin lets him eat and bed while he listens for the echoes of God among the grime and decay of the city.

He has yet to sink into the worst of Rome’s muck. Unlike the miserable souls begging on market corners and sleeping in the old sewers, he has something to sell. When his wealth runs out, if his body still clamours for life over the swelling quiet in him, someone will agree on a price for his blade. With the star of the Pope’s son ascendant, the knife-work needed in Rome will not soon be done.

His dreams seep into the pallour of his days. The southern shadows of ten years ago sit shoulder to shoulder with the bravos lounging under ancient porticos, and shove among the worshippers clustered on church steps. The cries of the dying become poetry that he scratches onto worn floorboards in the blood of his beloved. A splinter burrows under his nail, jolting him into full awareness.

Hissing, Micheletto plucks away the barb that has wormed into his skin from the rough-hewn table. Unassuming as he may seem on the wallside bench, under the guttering candles, he can’t afford to doze off. For every man or woman willing to hire him in Rome, there’s another that would rather see Cesare Borgia’s erstwhile executioner float down the Tiber himself.

"You, in the corner!" The tavern keeper has turned a sour eye towards him. "Buy something or clear the table. It’s not my grief if your fellows never showed, or whatever it is blew you in my door."

Micheletto levels back a look of studied disinterest. "Wine, then." The denari clink dully on the notched tabletop.

He'll wait another while for the man he was supposed to meet, until the rain ceases, and then he'll drift on. The tavern begins to fill. A crowd of artisans, he guesses by the attire and their speech, filters in and claims the wide table in the middle, proceeding to run the keeper's wife ragged with their demands for wine and food. 

Finally, the woman sweeps by Micheletto's table again, proffering the earthenware jug in her arms. "More wine, messer?"

He isn't a _messer_ and never will be, but he's used to the deference that he stirs in some people. It's as if they respond to the unspoken threat of violence he carries. _Only when I am paid for it._ Money made it simple. He might do well to recall that.

"If it keeps the table in my possession." He hums and holds out his cup for her to fill. "More water then, too."

She leans closer to pour. A few curly strands of hair escaped from her kerchief cling to her cheeks. "There's a lady wanting to speak to you by the kitchen door, messer. Says she won't come in."

A small splash of wine soaks into his shirtsleeve as his hand twitches under the spout of liquid. "There's plenty of men waiting under your roof."

"None of them have a look like you--I beg your pardon." Her gaze flicks to the tabletop. "I couldn't mistake you with that description. Will you come? The rain's coming harder now."

A woman alone, asking for him by the back door of a winehouse in the low quarters of Rome? No name, but a clear enough picture for the keeper's wife to pick him out in a full room.

The artisans fill the common room with enough laughter and argument that it will cover his exit. Gathering his cloak and sword, Micheletto drops another coin onto the table, then shuffles out to the cramped corridor that leads to the privy and onwards to the side street behind the building. The rain strikes his face at the same time as the restive whinny of a horse makes him turn. The animal is a silhouette crowded against the side of the building, its rider veiled by the downpour and a long, dripping cloak.

"You are harder to find than an honest banker in Florence," she says, in tones of mild exasperation, and something squeezes at his throat.

"My lady gives me too much credit." He doesn't know if he should bow or bolt.

"Shall I now add wordplay to your merits, Maestro Corella?" 

"And my lady well knows I am no such thing." In his bemusement, as if his meagre graces have utterly fallen from him, he keeps a hard stare on her.

Lucrezia Borgia chuckles, dark and unmerry, and then seems to take pity on him. "Neither did I sneak out to trade banter in a flooding alley. I wish to avail myself of your services."

Tension snakes up his spine. "Did he send you?"

Her fair face closes like a blade snapped into its sheath. "Surely my brother is too occupied with wooing his new condottieri. Best as I can tell, he doesn't even know you returned to Rome."

Chastened, though not by her words alone, Micheletto drops his gaze. So he would be free. Lord Borgia is not seeking him--and why, indeed, would he send his sister to fetch him? He has an army of men to rake through the streets.

"His Holiness is sending me to Nepi tomorrow. I wish to bring you with me."

The rain is soaking his uncovered head, running into his collar and creeping down his back. Finally his voice seems to return. "Why?"

"Because I remain a Borgia, and that puts me in danger."

"There are dozens of skilled bodyguards in..."

"All of whom will, in the final analysis, answer to my father or my brother." Her horse shifts again, and she lays a hand on the mare's neck. The movement brings her closer to him. In the dim of the rain, he can make out the dark weariness in eyes, the way her mouth stands out red against her pallid cheeks, as if she's been chewing her lips.

Some reflection of the pain awoken by this meeting shines back at him from her visage.

"That is it then." Lucrezia straightens herself. "If you agree, you can find a horse by the northern gate at noon tomorrow. There's a village some fifteen miles down the via Cassia where I will stay the night."

He breathes out in a noisy rasp. _They cannot see you,_ is what she is saying. Her husband is two weeks dead, and she's being sent from Rome.

He can see the open hand she offers. Is it to pull him free or to drag him into a trap? And what does she hold in the other--a blade to plunge into his heart, or a needle that might pierce the suppurating silence?

* * *

A few furtive questions in the twilight before sunrise lead him to a hillside outside the walls. Mud spatters him to the knees by the time he reaches the humble rows of grave markers. While some of them bear a scratched or carved inscription, others lack names, the sorry souls resting under them sent to the faraway Lord without a single mourner to know them in death.

He finds the right one because the gravedigger remembers the man who paid for the burial: a lord from the city on a grand horse, in austere black. The rest of the muddled description already fades from Micheletto's ears.

Crouching on the damp ground, he lowers himself to look at the wooden marker. He would go to his father's grave in bitter, murky defiance. Now his grief is as black, as hopelessly clouded.

_I cannot imagine you being born, Micheletto. Or dying, for that matter._

It served him well to let his lord preserve that illusion. He could allow Lord Borgia to mirror it back upon himself and be secure in it. What he was, all he was, was for Cesare. No work was too filthy or horrendous for him to take upon himself. The bodies he swept aside or piled up as stepping stones were one and all to advance the cause of the man to whom he swore his loyalty.

Until his heart split one day in ravaged Florence, and he remembered there was another way to bleed.

The wood feels carelessly sanded when he sets a palm upon it. "It's a strange fortune," he says, after a glance to make sure the gravedigger has not been overcome by curiosity. "That only leaving Rome brought me here."

Long after his father had been pitched into his grave, his mother would speak to her husband as if he were in the next room. She'd raise her voice to call him inside from the porch, or rattle on about the events of the day while preparing supper, as if her chatter could speak for them both, when one voice had been cut away. As if her faltering sense and lingering affections could summon the words she had grown used to hearing.

"Don't ask where I'm going, or when I'll return." He swallows. The marker is crude, unlikely to last long under the winter rains and storms. If he knew how, he'd scrape a name upon it, or leave some other sign of his passage. He carries little but his weapons. A knife stuck upon the ground would invite suspicion at best, and at worst, the next grieving fool to visit would take it to sell for a few coins.

Pascal deserves more than this, with his sculptures and his poems. Sorrow and fury seize a twin hold of Micheletto's throat.

"I'm riding for Nepi," he chokes out. "I don't know for how long." His other hand closes on a fistful of sandy earth.

"I don't know when, but I..." Does he speak because he can no longer be answered, or because it is too late? "I'll come when I can."

The sun peers over the crest of the hill in its climb across the sky. It will take him the better part of an hour to walk back to Rome. As he stands, his shadow stretches behind him. He can feel the other, deeper ones clinging to his feet: his mother, fled into her fancies; his father, his rage smothered only by death. Cesare, generous in his cruelty, an abyss into which he'd tip the moment he looked. Pascal, the warmth of the sun running into the heat of his blood on Micheletto's upturned face.

He turns, lets the dirt scatter from his unclenched hand, and leaves the potter's field.


	2. Cold Light

  
_And you, like marble, lady without peer,_  
 _hold possibilities of every kind;_  
 _you hold the good I want and pain I fear,_  
 _though I effect the opposite of my design._

\-- Michelangelo Buonarotti (tr. Leonard Cottrell)

* * *

Lucrezia Borgia settles into her fresh widowhood by dismissing every servant that followed her from Rome. They are either her brother's creatures or her father's, and neither is a welcome mention within earshot of the lady. She even sends back the household guard captained by one of Lord Borgia's newly hired condottieri, pitting an gem-hard stare against the gleam of his armour in the yard until he and his men mount their horses and trundle off.

"That was risky." Micheletto moves back from the window where he stood observing, as she steps back into her sitting room. "These walls will grant some safety, but I suppose you will wish to leave the castle now and then."

"Now and then I may tell you to accompany me." She sits down primly, her hands in her lap. "That is why you're here, no?"

His few belongings sit in a room in the servants' wing that he hardly uses. Even when unoccupied, he keeps on the move, mapping the twisting corridors of the castle and its environs.

"It is, my lady." He has been severed from Lord Borgia like a branch splintered from a tree, tossed away by a gale. "I must ask if it is the only reason."

The look Lucrezia gives him is threaded through with ambivalence. It should be an answer in itself.

"I will gladly be tasked with your and your son's protection," he begins, unwisely.

"Is that not enough? What more would you know?"

The highborn have their secrets; Micheletto, if anyone, should know not to push those limits. She will tell him what she requires of him, and hide his presence from the rest of her family. He'll have shelter and sustenance and a much easier time earning his keep than with his previous employer.

"Nothing." He turns his head away. "My apologies."

When he shifts, she's still looking his way, her expression weighed with an unspoken, perhaps unspeakable, mixture of emotion.

* * *

One fraught autumn morning, Lucrezia ushers Micheletto away on an errand of improbable haste, east and south on the via Cassia. When he sees the plumes of dust in the distance, raised by an immense plenty of men, horses and cannon jostling along the via Flaminia to the west, he halts his horse on the long, shallow hillside. Lord Borgia has begun his conquest of the Romagna. The host of papal and Spanish forces will be in Nepi by nightfall. She has sent him to Rome to fetch what any servant might while she receives her brother.

Does she think the castle walls would not conceal him if he put his mind to it? That he might trail after the Duke's army to rejoin his service? Long ago he rode off to war of his own free will, driven by demons with once-loved faces. Never a second time.

Micheletto leads his mount back into Nepi Castle the next evening. The only signs of the army's passage are the refuse smattering the roadsides and the mud of the courtyard, churned by a multitude of boots and hooves. At Lucrezia's summons, he brings the parcel wrapped by her mother, pinned with a private note on top, up to her quarters.

She has shed her mourning veil and dressed in deep blue, although her hair is bundled into a fine net. He takes in the change in her demeanour at a glimpse, before her eager hands divest him of the parcel.

"Oh, my books. You have my thanks."

"There's no need."

"Why not?" She begins to unwrap the cords and protective oiled leather. "A service well rendered isn't worthy of gratitude?"

"I am at your command, my lady." He feels exposed standing under the shimmering chandelier, in the middle of the room instead of having a wall or a doorjamb to his back.

"If that is so, then you're also under my protection." Spreading open the first of the leatherbound volumes, she lets her hands lie still upon the pages. "How was my mother?"

"Lady Vannozza wrote you a message," he says, then, after a stilted pause, "but she seemed well to my eye. She hopes for your quick return to Rome."

"Of course. As soon as I'm done with my theatrics." Lucrezia's lips crook even as her eyes stay placid. "My mourning of my husband is... impolitic when my brother has the French king in his sights."

Something seems to clamp down upon his spine, as if it were hardening to iron, stiffening his stance.

"Venice has granted him the title of _gentiluomo_ in a gesture of good faith," she continues. "Imagine that! And he has taken my lands in Sermoneta for his own use. I should have thinned the saddle straps of a few of his captains while they trod muck all over my halls and harassed my maids..."

Micheletto hears himself make an odd, hitched sound, dragging it back into his throat before it can fully form, but Lucrezia has stopped.

"You find it amusing?" She arches one beautifully curved brow.

"No, my lady." If it were possible to drink in her every word and at the same time want to retch them up, that would be how he feels. Then, a third sentiment intrudes, and he seizes upon it if only because it is the gentlest of them. "Something poured into the soup would work as well, and leave fewer traces."

"Well," she says, and this time her smile blooms the rest of the way. "I shall remember that for the next time I entertain contrary guests."

He cannot smile in return, but his shoulders slacken a little. "Perhaps then you will also let me stay, so I can keep to my main task."

"Perhaps." She returns to leafing the heavy, yellowed pages of the book. "You've ridden hard. Go rest, Micheletto. These walls will be safe enough for us both tonight."

* * *

The oncoming cold season snips the days ever shorter. It does little to quiet the uproar of the Romagna. Vested with the Holy Father's every blessing, Duke Valentino claims fortress after town along the via Flaminia: Spoleto, Pesaro, Rimini, which opens its gates to embrace its illustrious conqueror without a single sword being drawn. Tidings trickle back to Nepi on the lips of busy messengers and the wings of the occasional dove, flown from Lady Vannozza's dovecote to its sister in Lucrezia's small garden.

Evening falls ever earlier the older autumn grows, and the pace of life at the castle slows down. The household shuffles to bed at sunset, but between the first and second sleep, hearths and rushlights are lit to provide warmth and illumination to work or tinker by.

Micheletto finds tattered nightmares unfurling themselves from the recesses of his memory. It's the greater death in the air that seems to spread them out. Soldiers moan in the wind that shakes the shutters. They beg for their mothers, their captains or their God in Catalan or Arabic, or in the tongues of suffering that all men share.

Some nights he pulls those dreams around him like another blanket, old and worn to his shape. The faded pains buffer newer, keener ones, and sleep takes him soon again. Other nights, he lies awake, his shin throbbing with the phantom of inflamed flesh, until he puts his feet to the floor to show himself that the bone is long healed and his leg holds. Then he walks the castle, a watchman's circuit, sheathed sword in his hand--nothing else will stand between him and heathen steel if there's an ambush. Peering through arrow slits, ducking the other servants with their candles and their gossip, he lets his head clear. 

This is how Lucrezia discovers him. Her lantern teases out his shape from along the wall, her face cast in a similar relief of light and dark.

"I thought I heard something in the dovecote," she says without preamble. Her slippers are bedecked with withered grass and earth, as are the hems of her skirts. "A hawk, perhaps."

"They only hunt by daylight." Unasked, Micheletto falls into step behind her. "With your leave, I'll set a few traps in the garden in the morning."

"Please do." She dips her chin as if to emphasise the dry note in her voice. "Now you may escort me to my rooms."

Fewer assassins may creep through the dark in Nepi than in Rome, but her levity belies the fact that she's abroad alone in the dead of night. Still, she's hardly a more wayward charge to watch over than her brother. The reminder makes him blow out a discomfited breath.

At the door, she motions for him to follow her in. Taken aback, he stays by the threshold, huddled into his quilted cape in his shirtsleeves, as she slips off her woollen cloak. Her maid rustles the coals in the fireplace, adds a log in the waking flames and melts away into the side room.

"You can come in," Lucrezia says, long-suffering. "If there is an assailant, you'll hardly stop him with your hands that stiff with cold."

Squatting down by the hearth, he lays his sword atop the stonework at the base of it. She flits into another room to look in on her sleeping child, and he contemplates an inconspicuous exit, only to be thwarted by her return.

"You asked me once why I wished to hire you." She emerges into the ruddy sphere of the firelight.

"Yes. You owe me no explanation. I agreed to your terms."

"You would truly be content with that?"

"It... it is not my place to question your word, my lady."

"Then I shall invite you to question it." Seating herself, Lucrezia raises her chin, the point of her gaze on some detail of the mantelpiece. "Should it not bother you? The chance that I am playing a long game you haven't yet worked out."

Is it his part in their agreement or her own that is the focus of her fascination?

"It's your privilege to amuse yourself however you choose," he says. "As I saw it, you had a use for a swordsman."

He is hedging. Had she simply wanted a competent bravo, she could have hired ten right off the street in his stead. They would have devoted themselves to her coin if not to her person, and if she'd had a fancy to beckon one to her rooms on a gusty winter night, that, too, would have been her privilege.

"Oh, don't be coy. It suits a blushing youth, not a man who has gone to such lengths as you because he won't surrender what he is."

"My lady?" Micheletto would scramble up, reach for his sword, if he knew exactly on whom to turn the blade. Dread rises in him like a blood-laden gorge.

"We are alike in one thing, you and I." Her voice is soft and measured. She has not moved. "My brother forced both our hands in the death of someone we held dear."

If he so much as blinks, he'll go to pieces.

"And I may not be much mistaken if I say that your lover died on my account."

He took a crossbow bolt between his ribs once, in mid-stride, toppled into the surfeit of mauled bodies at his feet. Her words punch through him with the same merciless force, and he forces his stunned exhalation not to become a cry.

"I was in danger, and my brother cast the blame for that on--"

"Stop." The sound breaks from him in a haggard plea. "Have mercy." The fragile shell of distance and forgetfulness he has spun around Pascal, around his desire and his ruin-- _but none like you, boy_ \--is peeling away under the intractable advance of her words. 

When Lucrezia's hand alights on his head he accepts the touch, mute and taut with his own pain, detached from the firelit room and the hard floor under his knees. She stands over him like a nameless saint of the lost and sorrowing, an earthly woman with his salvation on the tip of her tongue as she damns him to look upon himself and see.

"Mercy is in short supply in this family of mine," she whispers. Her fingers card through his hair. "But you may have what is mine to give. One I love cut a deep wound in you, and you've let it fester. Mourn. Mourn as you must."

Grown unbearable, the strain in him snaps. As he still draws breath, as death's pale hand seems to have passed him by in its counting, he is left to hunch before her and let his anguish batter down the last of the walls trammelling it in.


	3. Pilgrim

  
_So terror, which is always near_  
_to beauty, feeds desire strange food._  
_My mind falls silent and no longer says_  
_if joy or pain be more: the sight_  
_of you calls forth the End of Days,_  
_yet gives me great delight._

\-- Michelangelo Buonarotti (tr. Leonard Cottrell)

* * *

The somnolent sojourn in Nepi ends before the year is out. Lady Lucrezia's absence has softened the Holy Father's heart, or at least smoothed over the unrest her displays of distress might have stirred. A few joyous lines from Lady Vannozza spell an end to her isolation even before the Pope's courier, obstructed by the winter roads, reaches Nepi.

Rather than lose himself among the lady's retinue, Micheletto departs the town alone. The wind gnaws at his cheeks and fingertips through his warm travel garb as he hoists himself into the saddle.

"Go to my mother's house," Lucrezia advises him, descended to the courtyard from her morning routines. "That's where I plan to stay, too. My brother will be away in the north for some time yet."

He half expected her to dismiss him at this juncture: in Rome, the papal guard will afford her every protection. He also understands that as a player at intrigue, Lucrezia might rise to be the match of her brother. Were it not for the hindrance of her sex, and the circumstances of a woman's life, she might even surpass him at the game.

"It will be harder to escape notice in Rome."

"My mother already knows," she says. "You would prefer to stay hidden?"

The query is inclement no matter how well she might mean it. She has besieged him with kindness, dropping soft words and small favours in his way as the months stretch along. He makes himself meet her eye.

"I would prefer to stay in your service, my lady."

"Was that ever in doubt?" She chuckles. "I've been away from Rome since summer. That's a long time for a city to change. I would know what I can expect to face."

"The streets and taverns are more my purview than any halls where you might set foot." He pauses as she purses her mouth in evident expectation of better from him. "And rumour flows downhill from every seat of power. My eyes and ears are yours."

"Very good." Lucrezia claps her hands, perhaps more to banish the cold. "Take care on the road."

With a last, solemn nod to her, he spurs his horse on under the barbican and the raised portcullis, away from the castle and its refuge, to the road to Rome.

* * *

A pretence of languor comes more difficult to Micheletto than one might guess, after an adulthood spent in wait for whatever danger strikes next. Stretched out on a piece of ancient masonry, his head tilted down as if in a doze, he pricks his ear for the band of chattering servants. Their master is hosting a gathering of his friends in the green glade at the heart of the garden.

The man is a merchant rather than a noble, but he supplies silks to a lordling of the Marches. Lucrezia's speculation is that he also ferries messages on behalf of the nobleman, and she would know where and how far they travel.

Thus, Micheletto notes who comes and who goes from this afternoon's diversion. To most onlookers, he should pass for a bored man of the city enjoying the public garden.

One of the merchant's guards appears to have another idea. He's a lean, sun-browned man of southern stock, wearing no armour but with a sword belted at his hip. He also thinks he is subtler than he is in the glances he sneaks Micheletto's way, and Micheletto cannot quite tell if it is suspicion or curiosity that alights the guard's eye upon him time and again.

Finally, he catches and returns one of those looks, raises his chin and watches the man detach himself from his post to saunter closer.

"There something here that interests you?"

"Who is your master?" Micheletto makes a helpful hand motion towards the company on the green, just as a raucous bout of laughter breaks out among the men. The women join in in more restrained notes, but the merriment rings round the group.

"Who's asking?"

"A curious townsman," Micheletto says. "No need to take offence."

"Would the likes of you know how to give a slight, seeing how meekly you speak?"

From where he sits, with the dagger in his boot, Micheletto would need four steps and half as many heartbeats to kill the other.

"I can see that _you_ do." He huffs, though the wisp of exhalation is soft. "Not that offence is hard to give in this Rome of ours."

 _Whom can we trust, in this Rome of ours?_ He can almost hear Cesare's cadence mirrored in that of his own voice. 

And has it been too long since he read fascination in another's face, or felt a stirring of an answer in kind?

"His name is Adelmo de Tarri." The other man's eyes are a deep, startling green in his tanned face. "From Trastevere."

With a show of stretching his arms up, feeling his shoulder pop after his long lassitude, Micheletto drops his feet to the ground on one side of the ruined plinth. The master's name will lead him to the henchman, if he so wishes. "I will remember that."

* * *

Lucrezia listens to Micheletto's recounting without comment, leaned deep into her chair in the blessedly cool, shadowed study.

"Thank you," she says, and her eyes glimmer when he nods his acceptance. "I shall spin a few wheels myself and see what sort of grain they grind."

She strums her net with much lighter fingers than Lord Borgia, wielding wit and suggestion to subtler ends than a slit throat or an untimely tip from a viewing gallery may accomplish. The times when he strays into such comparison have thinned lately--as have the times when the slicing knife or the shoving hand would be his.

"Though I had best be quick about it," she continues. "I am to go to Ferrara this winter, after all."

"The marriage contract is signed?" Micheletto braces his knuckles on the rim of the sloping writing desk.

"His Grace sent a persuasive envoy." The merest of sighs escapes her. "I'm told my new husband's conversational skills aren't quite up to par. It is a sensible match. My father will secure the northern interests of his papacy, and..."

Duke Valentino need not subdue another noble family in a welter of blood. The grievous sack of Capua by his troops will--one might hope--remain a single blemish on his struggle to join the peninsula under one rule. Italian-born though he is, Micheletto has rarely seen the kind of war, needful, lofty and honourable, that the nobility boasts of waging.

Lucrezia's dainty cough recalls him to the moment. "My brother is coming home for the announcement of the betrothal."

"Another dance, then." Micheletto stands up straight. Who is he sheltering with the request, himself or her? 

The habitual byword used between them elicits a laugh from her. "Do you speak Catalan?"

"If my lady will forgive a common accent," he says, the form of the language rusty and groaning in his mouth.

"A common accent is best for this task." Her answer is far more polished. She dips her quill, then continues, in her usual Roman tones, "Our friend in the silk trade has a partner in Aragon. I would send you to the coast and see whose ships sail in his benefit. Here, I will..."

"My Catalan will serve, but I do not read, my lady." He pre-empts her before she can write more than the first flourish of her instructions. "You can tell me, and I'll remember."

"That surprises me on two counts." Her brow creases as she leafs through her papers. "You are learned but not lettered. The clergy would hardly believe that to be possible."

"My teachers were a different breed."

"Then you must regale me with that tale some time, when I don't have a hundred invitations to send. Will you be ready to leave at dawn?"

There's a fleeting flash of green eyes, a defiantly canted chin, in his mind. Too swiftly they darken to a deep brown gaze, shift to a pliant, clever mouth-- _I don't know, but it happens, and I burn_.

"Yes." A few days on the road may do him good. If nothing else, they will pry his thoughts from these spiny sentiments. He has firm ground under his feet again, though for more complex reasons than the steady repayment of his investigative labours.

* * *

He rides wide to the west, to lurk among fishmongers and sailors in the towns of the Ligurian Coast, and sink covert hooks into the trailing ends of truths. It is easy enough to clad himself in an old guise: a soldier of fortune, on the lookout for a mercenary company or at least a few easy scudi.

Word streams up the coast of the extravagant festivities in Rome in honour of the betrothal between the families of Borgia and d'Este. Micheletto, for his part, listens for inklings of Duke Valentino's movements. 

Cesare is lodged in him like an arrow. If the shaft is ever to come out, it may take his breath and blood with it, for it is all that blocks the hole in him.

The first time Micheletto sees him in eighteen months is on the via Flaminia, outside the snow-veiled walls of the city. The wedding ceremony is done, and Lord Borgia is escorting his sister as she leaves for Ferrara, a wife for a third time.

All the power and prosperity of the Borgia family is in evidence in the train of horses and people making its ponderous way north under the falling snow. Pope Alexander spared no material expense in this display in honour of his daughter. Micheletto, riding among the guards, pays it little heed. The mail and helmet weigh on his back and shoulders, long unaccustomed to such encumbrance, but together with his scarf and hood the helmet hides his face.

Lord Borgia gallops past bare-headed, as if defying the snowfall of all things, his cloak like a wing beating behind him. Micheletto tugs on the reins, reflexive, unprepared. As his horse stalls, he seems to strain the other way, ready to give the animal its head and pursue that distancing silhouette. A flash of a cold-bitten cheek, a tumble of raven hair, a mere glimpse.

Like looking into the sun. He turns his head away and down.

"Hey, keep moving!"

With a perfunctory, muttered obscenity at the rider behind him, Micheletto puts his heels to the flanks of his mount again.

* * *

"You fought in the Reconquista, in Spain," Lucrezia declares. She has curled under an embroidered mantle in a deep chair, which she demanded to be hauled as close to the fireplace as it could fit. Outside, a snowfall turns the town of Ferrara white and featureless.

The last celebrations at Castle Estense ceased a day or two ago. Since then, pleading exhaustion over her journey and her reception by her new husband, she has been ensconced in her private rooms.

"For four years, my lady." Micheletto has found a seat that affords him a view of the entire room. The brusque, reclusive Alfonso d'Este did not gainsay his wife's declaration that Micheletto was to be part of her household staff. As long as that is so, he shoulders the responsibility for her safety.

Sometimes, as it tends to be with Lucrezia Borgia, that duty expands to unexpected dimensions.

"Then you must have seen much. Málaga and Baza, and... the defeat of the Moors at Granada, I assume?" Her curiosity is like a flickering flame, rapt and shining. "That is why you speak Catalan."

"Yes." He dabs a rag in oil and begins cleaning the first of his knives. "I was not at Granada, but the rest is as you say."

"I've never been to Spain. What an irony. The Italian families detest us for our roots, and still I know less of the country than even you must."

"Hatred is easy," he says quietly. "The Spaniards hated the Saracens more than they hated Italian mercenaries, so they welcomed us to die by their side."

"How did you leave in the first place?" She pauses to count with her fingers. "It's been fifteen years since the siege of Málaga. How old were you?"

"I leave the reckoning to the priests." A speck of dirt is caught under the crosspiece of the knife, and he angles the blade to tease it off. "They marked down 1469 as my birth year."

"That would make eighteen years. Maybe fewer than that."

In the last few moments, he's divulged more of his history to her than to almost anyone alive. He has done it willingly, even if at her coaxing. 

"Old enough to do a man's work," he says. "Your... brother was a bishop at fifteen."

The silence lingers for a few trailing heartbeats. "What took you all the way there?"

"You would not be content if I said I was moved by Christian piety, and the truth is dusty and drab." The truth is bound up in long-buried pain. His father's ghost has faded in the intervening years, but his mind is a mirror, not the reflection in a dim pool that most people seem to have of the past. He forgets little, and nothing of what matters most.

"Christian piety indeed." Lucrezia laughs. "Vanquishing the savage Moor in the name of the Lord. Yet I hear the Alhambra palace in Granada is a wonder of the world." Delicately, she brushes a long blond strand from her cheek. "And in most every discipline, the Saracens have kept what we've lost. We study their Avicenna to grasp at what the Greeks said on healing."

"I only know that when you stab a Moor he bleeds red, my lady." He sets aside one knife and starts on the next one, the strokes of his rag practiced and unthinking. "Conquest is conquest."

"I suppose," she says, a rare admission of uncertainty. Her thoughts, as his so often do, might be drifting to another string of triumphs, to the victorious swath her brother has cut through Italy. After a moment, she stands from her seat. "Well, that is it for war stories. I have another thought."

He continues whetting his blade as she flits about the room like a purposeful breeze. Her round complete, she puts down her box of writing implements and a sheaf of papers on the hearthside table. Then she lights three tapers with a rush she touches to the low-burning flames.

"I have decided," she says. "Today I shall teach you to read and write."

He is no longer quite so perturbed by her mercurial moods, but this gives him pause. "My lady, I don't think a day will be enough."

"Will you think of another diversion while this dreadful weather lasts? The snow could carry on all week. At the very least, we'll get a good start."

"As you wish." While there may be a way to counter her manner, as soft as it is imperious, it is beyond Micheletto. He pulls his chair next to hers, hesitates, and sits down at her nod.

"I feel you might look less alarmed if I'd asked you to kill a man."

"I would know how to wield the dagger." His timbre is mild.

"And have you ever held a pen?" Tapping the quill to shed the excess ink, she passes it to him.

He grasps it with abruptly clumsy fingers, only to have her lean over to correct his grip. "Gently. Let it rest easy. Is there anything you can write? Your name?"

The innocuous question unfurls a memory: a scrawl of letters in chalk across age-worn wood, and his own querying voice, low and mistrustful. _What does it mean?_

Beside him, Lucrezia regards him expectantly. To appease her or to push past his own disquiet, Micheletto writes down, line by line, the word in his recollection.

"Yes," she says, with a hint of approval. "Anything more? I should find a book we can use for practice. Something in an Italian tongue..."

He could not say what prompts him to give her the second word, the only other word he can properly record. Again she rises, to scrounge through her bookshelf, and again he writes, smudging the last letter with the side of his finger.

Lucrezia's brows knit as she picks up the sheet. " 'Goodbye?'"

"You asked what I knew."

"I..."

Has he presumed too much? His insight doesn't span the prospect of his lady deciding to tutor him upon a whim. She asked, and he answered. What it costs him, he should measure in his own time.

Her mouth presses into a line while her pen moves across the paper. "Here." It isn't much above a murmur. "Pleasantries won't be a bad place to begin."

"What does it say?"

Her mouth softens, drawing into a faint, wry smile. " 'Hello'."

Micheletto extends his hand, palm up, for the quill. Slipping it into his fingers, she lays her hand against the back of his for a moment.

* * *

The back of winter breaks in due course, collapsing into riotously flowering spring. Although the fields and orchards spread with fresh life, the young lady of Castle Estense ails in the northern climate.

Recurring fevers and aches fold her into bed after midsummer. The women of the household bar entry to her chambers and nurse her with pragmatic patience. It may be the strains of administering the bustling castle. Or it is the rumoured schism between her and her sister-in-law, the fierce Isabella d'Este, or her austere treatment by the old Duke d'Este. Pregnancy is suspected, sometimes in hopeful tones, for it would mean a much awaited heir to the line.

For want of other help he could render, Micheletto haunts her door, as stoical as her caretakers. After a while, the castle guards give him a berth. He is an oddity among Lady Lucrezia's servants, and it is understood that she keeps him on out of some private caprice.

"I should have introduced you as a distant relative," she muses on one of her more cheery days. Her bouts of illness have dimmed her clear gaze, and her cheeks are lean and sallow, but Micheletto listens to the spark of humour in her tone. "A bastard cousin several times removed. Corella is a Spanish name, is it not?"

He nods agreement, withdrawing from the way of her maid as the woman dashes up to the canopied bed. "Madonna, there's someone to see you."

"Who is it, Ghita?"

"There's a band of knights in the courtyard, and one is asking to meet you. Demanding, I ought to say."

Micheletto turns at the noise of approaching footfalls, evidently made heavier by rattling mail. The reigning Duke, a crafty, hardened man, would never suffer his watchmen to let an armed intruder past the doors. Micheletto loosens his dagger all the same.

"Why would that be?" Lucrezia says.

"It's the strangest thing, madonna. He says he's..." Ghita is cut short by the door swinging open.

A man in the coat of mail and dark tabard of a Knight Hospitaller strides into the room, the white, notched cross of the order on his chest. The scabbard at his hip bangs empty against his leg--a necessary courtesy to the lord of the castle. He has removed his helmet.

All these details fall into Micheletto's focus and tumble away, barely noted.

"Cesare!" Lucrezia is the first to regain her voice or her wits.

"Lucrezia," he replies, more softly. His gaze catches on her, as it always will, and retreats to Micheletto, standing at the foot of the bed. "You."

Micheletto's hand remains on the dagger hilt. He sees Cesare twitch towards his absent sword, the same way he seeks his weapon, to provide a solid point when the air seems too thin to draw into lungs.

"Brother, no." Arduously, Lucrezia sits up straight. "No. He's here on my request."

"What in God's name is going on?" The question may be aimed at her, but Cesare stares at Micheletto in fixated astonishment. The look is a living thing between them, thrashing and clinging. _He did not know_.

"Ghita, be so good as to make sure our other guests are fed." Collecting herself, with an almost subliminal effort, Lucrezia motions her maid towards the door. "Micheletto, please. I would speak to my brother alone."

Her request blinks bright in the roiling fog of his mind. Sketching the slightest of bows to her, he breaks the eye contact. It seems to drag, like twisting a fresh switch from a willow, until he's past the threshold and the door swings shut at his heels.

* * *

Lacking any other directive, he stays in the hallway. A span of sunlight strikes the wall from the gap between two shutters. He watches the strip of light creep onward for what feels like an aeon, rather than the fraction of an hour it probably is.

The door muffles the shapes of words. Lucrezia's high voice is steady, often dropping so that it vanishes entirely, weaving between the harsher snatches of Cesare's speech. Micheletto cannot hear, but neither can he quite stop himself. Once, Cesare bellows something that nearly sends him back into the room, orders and manners be damned, because Lucrezia's defence is his highest command.

But from her brother, too? When, by all accounts, it is her who has shielded Micheletto for the past two years.

The door scuffs open. Still in full knightly kit, Cesare steps out, his demeanour thunderous, stewing with unspent emotion.

Passing unnoticed is one of Micheletto's greatest gifts. When things come to a head, when the last exit is shuttered, he would rather fight than fold. It seems Cesare is in agreement.

"You," he says, again. "You've been with her since Nepi."

"Most often." He has to find his footings, a measure of balance on dissolving foundations.

"And--and you never--"

"I said my goodbyes, Your Grace." All of them, by now. So he has almost come to believe.

"I thought you were _dead_ , lying in some gutter in Rome where..." Cesare's sentence is snipped by a gust of breath.

"Where I should be?"

Cesare's eyes widen. Whether the shock is stirred by Micheletto's temerity or something else, he could not say. The twinges of his moods still play across Cesare's face with the same, familiar fluidity. Whatever he was, he was neither staid nor solemn, and Micheletto could most often read his next command in the cant of a brow or a minute shift in his stance.

"You know bloody well where you should be!" Cesare bites out. "I have taken the Romagna, and yet half my condottieri don't know their heads from their arses."

"I'm sure they'll forgive Your Grace that fit of temper." There it is again, the sense that his spine is a rod of iron, skewering or supporting him. "Or, if that's the truth, they don't seem to hamper you much."

"How dare you." Micheletto might ask himself the same. Cesare grits his teeth. "I thought I'd never--and here you are, bold as you please, in my sister's house! _Two years_ , Micheletto!"

Sometimes the fear of pain cripples a body worse than pain itself. Now, when Cesare is here, hoarse with fury, his hands squeezed into fists, he is flesh and blood, real and present, in Micheletto's regard again.

"And here I will stay, Your Grace."

"I've had men killed for lesser insolence," Cesare hisses.

"I handed you a blade for that very purpose once." He has seen how far Lord Borgia can be driven in his anger, yet he hears himself speak on. "You did not take it."

"That can be rectified!" In three steps Cesare is close enough to seize a fistful of Micheletto's jacket, swinging him roughly towards the wall. Micheletto slaps a hand over Cesare's wrist and, with a swivelling movement of his own, forces his hand to bend back at the elbow.

"Stop." He locks his own arm straight, keeping Cesare at its length, though his muscles tauten with the exertion. "Enough. If we are to shed blood someplace, let it not be at your sister's door."

It is only for so long that he can center himself. Through the leather of Cesare's riding glove, the contours of his knuckles fit under the curve of Micheletto's restraining hand. Then they slide away as Cesare's arm slackens, dropping back to his side.

"I have to be in Milan in ten days." The fire in Cesare seems to collapse into cinders--and with that, with what replaces the rage in his visage, Micheletto averts his eyes.

"Then you ought to give your sister what time you can." He takes a step back. Pauses. Cesare makes a stiff, guttural sound. "Perhaps take off the armour for a while."

And the throaty sound bursts into a scattering of bleak laughter. "A necessary disguise, I'm afraid. I do recall a few of your lessons."

"Good." With a fleeting backward glance that does not find Cesare's face, Micheletto leaves the hallway, while he still may.


	4. Sanctum

  
_The messenger brings sad news,_  
 _but words cannot obscure the truth._  
 _Write 'prison' on the garden gate;_  
 _that word does not a prison make._

\-- Rumi (tr. Zara Houshmand)

* * *

Lucrezia dismisses the messenger to the kitchen for a drink of water. The August heat smothers even in the cool of the stone walls, and the streets have turned into channels for the summer dust to float across all of Rome. Her visit to her mother's house has already proven less restful than hoped, but the runner's words have drained all colour from her face. Poised as a dagger balanced on its tip, she walks back to the staircase.

"The Holy Father is ill. The Vatican is locked down."

Pushing himself out of the cover of a pillar, Micheletto waits for her to continue. When she doesn't, only inhales, a hiss between her teeth, he concludes for her, "Then they think he's dying."

"They must."

He tries to gentle his next words. "This would be a good time for you to find a whim to visit a friend outside Rome, my lady. Perhaps Lady Farnese. Is it Carbognano where she now resides?"

"There's more." Lucrezia's eyes are pinioned to the wall. "His Holiness doesn't ail alone."

She is a study in rigorous calm, but her hands tremble, curled one into the other. The realisation sinks into Micheletto as if he were swallowing ice.

"Cesare."

For months now, Duke Valentino and his troops have lingered in Rome, awaiting a change in the power balance of the French and Spanish armies. In fact, the recent days have rattled with premonitions that Lord Borgia might finally take the initiative and take his quarrelsome soldiers with him to the field.

"They claim it's marsh fever," she says thinly. "Malaria."

They stand together in the rippling silence the word leaves behind. If the messenger's information is accurate, then the Pope, three-and-seventy for all his vim and vigour, is likely to perish. When the fever spells grip a man, they shake him empty even if he survives.

"I must send my son and my mother away. To Giulia, that is a good idea. The important thing is that they're out of the city." She touches his arm in a flutter of fingers. "Will you..." _Ride with them?_ He can guess her meaning well enough.

A question, not a command. Her plans don't include herself, and being who she is, being the Pope's beloved daughter, the Duke's esteemed sister, she may succeed in getting where she intends to go. Even with his own thoughts crumbling like chalk, smearing whichever way he tries to grasp them, he forces himself to concentrate on her.

"Lady Lucrezia." There's an entreaty in the sound of her name. "When the Holy Father leaves this earth, the Vatican will be the worst possible place for you to be. Your brother's power hinges upon His Holiness."

_Do not let them use you this time._

"Do you not think I know that?" Her eyes flash fire through the bridled anguish.

"You know, I know, _they_ know. If it were up to me, as your protector, I'd bundle you onto a horse and weasel you out of the gates within the hour."

He thinks she will strike him. He would let her. Her hand clenches into a fist in the space between them, and she presses it to her mouth.

"They will do all they can to prevent word from getting out," she says suddenly. "People still need to move in and out. There will be a summons for physicians. But no doctor in Christendom knows how to _cure_ malaria."

"No Christian doctor," he repeats. A wild, impossible plan is taking shape without his leave or his willing it. When it comes to Cesare, it is a scarce part of him that hears reason. "There are other healers in Rome."

A twinge of understanding quickens Lucrezia's expression. "Tell me."

"I know someone." An acquaintance from years ago lives in the riverside warrens of Rome, arrived from Spain after the battles ended and other terrors rose in their stead.

"And this someone knows... what can save my family?"

He doesn't bother to correct her. Unless God Himself reaches down with a miracle, the Holy Father will not live through the recurring fevers.

"This one saved my leg when a Saracen spearman stabbed me in Baza." He keeps his countenance even. "I cannot _promise_ you, my lady. Only that I'll go and ask right now."

Her face twists, a youthful pang of resentment, as if she understood the that world will not stop turning for her, but the fact still excoriated her.

"Do it," she says. "You'll also need to acquire a few other things. A medicine chest. Some palliatives for fever. Shall I write them down?"

"No need. I may be a few hours."

"Each of them counts, Micheletto." She makes an emphatic gesture. "I trust you'll use them well. I'll take care of the rest in the meantime."

He listens for as long as it takes her to tick off her list of remedies, then whisks down the stairs. Behind him, the household is galvanised, maid by cook by stable boy, into the many tasks of a departure.

* * *

His freshly shaven chin itches. Being rid of the beard might be a relief in the heat, but Micheletto finds the sensation disquieting. It should be the least of his trials: he tries to adopt a sedate gait as the two of them approach the gate in the Vatican wall.

Bowing a greeting, polite but not subservient, he presents himself to the guards. Under threat of pointed spears, they are more shoved than shown through the gate and onto the edge of the Square of Saint Peter. In a moment, a scribe with a drawn, harried face takes them under his inspection.

Plastering a veneer of dignity on his unease, Micheletto repeats his assumed name and his ostensible business. "You summoned every healer in Rome. I arrived recently from Cesena."

"And your credentials?"

The slim leather case sticks in some fold of his wide sleeve before he can get it out. _"I found my brother's degree. My mother had kept it,"_ Lucrezia explained upon his return. _"It'll have to be from the University of Pisa. They do teach medicine there."_

He never looks at her while the scribe peruses the fruits of her forgery, though she fairly thrums with tension.

"Very well, dottore." The scribe hands the document, scrubbed and worn to an age beyond its few hours, back to him, and he rolls it up with care. "If you believe you can do something, do it quickly." The man shakes his head. "And the consequences of failure fall upon your own head."

"I am well aware of that," Micheletto says. "Come, boy."

Under the cap, Lucrezia's eyes are wide and downcast, as if the mere prospect of treading these hallowed halls petrified her. She shifts the strap of the borrowed medicine chest across her shoulder and scurries close on his heels--another calculated gesture--as the guards let them in.

The bedroom reeks despite the incense burners squatting in the corners, wafting with cloying smoke. They do not mask the sickness in the air, but the smell of fever rouses a beat of relief in Micheletto. Life clings to this chamber, not decay. Her arms laden with linens, a servant gasps in alarm from the side of the room.

"Water," he tells the girl. "And clean rags. Make it quick."

Meanwhile, Lucrezia scoots up to the bed. She opens the medicine chest and begins laying out tools and vials, bent over the task with the utmost concentration.

"Dottore." The servant bobs a curtsey and is gone in a billow of brown skirts. Micheletto is already turning towards the bed.

Cesare sleeps. His breath scrapes through a fever-dry throat, and his face is grey and sunken. His pulse a frantic throb, he burns under Micheletto's hands, in the squeeze of a fever spell. The _febbre terzana_ comes and goes in waves: they have caught it at high tide.

Lucrezia makes a noise between distaste and concern. "How can anyone breathe in here? No wonder he seems as if he's on fire." Shuffling the curtains, she fumbles for the shutters.

"No!" Micheletto warns. "Our business here could take hours, and the Vatican is full of ears. I must ask that you endure the heat." As well as the smells that hang dense in the chamber. "We have to bring the fever down."

"Surely you're not suggesting we bleed him? You said it was a tisane! He's barely conscious as it is."

"Your Moorish physicians prescribe bleeding a fevered man?" Every field surgeon he has ever met focused on keeping the blood _inside_ their patients. He knows little of titled healers--their precarious pretence to get inside the Vatican notwithstanding--but he has seen something of what kills or cures a man.

"Galen does," she says as if the name ought to mean something. "I... I wouldn't know how."

It costs her to confess that, proud, self-possessed Lucrezia. Her father may be dying in the rooms above, and while Micheletto and his own father came to a brutal end, filial feeling is not entirely alien to him.

Nor are her profound, tangled emotions for the man lying in the bed.

"If he's sweating, he must drink. Water or the remedy. Both, in the best case."

"I think I can make something for that," Lucrezia says. "There's feverfew in here, and vervain and peppermint. Your... someone knows his medical plants."

"Your knowledge of how to apply them will decide this." The fireplace in the room is cold, so Micheletto sets to lighting it. The safest course will be to let her brew her tisanes and poultices here.

"Or this will." Lucrezia pries their prize from the chest: a cloth pouch filled with a sweet-smelling herb that had no name in any Italian dialect. She presses the bag briefly to her nose. "God willing."

"Then it is best you give the good Lord a leg up."

The maid returns and leaves again, at Micheletto's curt demand. Even though he plays the doctor to whoever strays into the room, it is Lucrezia who pinches and measures and infuses the medicine, counting the right time for each stage. Tilting Cesare's head, she makes him drink the lukewarm remedies, sip by sip, wiping his face and cajoling him when he only moans and tries to wrest his head away. Micheletto tells himself he must know her voice, but he grants them no outward sign of recognition.

The hours wear on: the wide August day nears evening. Micheletto has groused another of Cesare's generals out of the room, pleading--or pressing--the fact that the Duke sleeps peacefully at last. The Vatican may be quietly going to pieces around their ears, but only rest will allow Lucrezia's brews to do their work.

"Good," she says, half to her patient, her hand on his temple. "That's good. The fever's coming down."

"Mmm," Cesare breathes by way of reply. His eyelids flutter open, only for him to jump halfway upright and sag back into the sheets. "Lucrezia?"

"Yes, my love. Shh. Don't speak my name." She has removed the doublet, labouring near the fire in the smothering room, and the sleeves of her loose white shirt are rolled up to her elbows.

"I thought... I heard you."

"You did." She lays a hand on his chest, as if to keep him still. "I'm here to help. You're very ill."

"And... our father?"

"I have not seen him." She bows her head. Cesare cups a leaden, shaky hand over hers. "It may be too late," she says. "But not for you."

"You should not be here." Amid the fever haze, amid whatever concerns that must pierce him, Cesare lands upon the worry for her safety.

"But I am here," Lucrezia ripostes with a hint of defiance. "And by hook or by crook I shall save you."

For a reason Micheletto cannot fathom, Cesare chuckles at that, something sweet and distant to the chafing sound.

A discordant voice carries through the door beside which Micheletto stands. Alarm surges through him, even without an inkling as to the cause. With a hasty look Lucrezia's way, he opens the door before whoever is approaching can storm in.

" _Another_ disturbance?" He doesn't need to strive much for a peevish tone.

"Dottore?" It is the scribe from the gate, appearing as if his day has run as long and troublesome as theirs. "I'm afraid I must ask. Are you familiar with a doctor named Niccolò Masini? He's here from Cesena, and..."

 _Cesena_. Nothing good lies at the outcome of this inquiry.

"Master!" Lucrezia instills her voice with an admirable note of panic. Cesare, for his part, makes an abrupt, broken groan, curling onto his side as if in a spasm of pain.

"I don't care if he descended from the moon," Micheletto growls at the startled scribe. "I have a patient to tend to, if you'd be so kind as to let me work." Then he slams the door.

"We have to leave," he calls to Lucrezia. "Right now."

"Yes, we do. That man was at my sickbed in Ferrara once. I imagine he knows the other _actual_ doctors in Cesena."

"Micheletto?" Quite at the end of his pretended fit, Cesare appears no less steady for it. His eyes are slitted with an effort of scrutiny. "You, too? I'm not..."

"I told you," Micheletto says, choked, as his feet carry him to the bed without any direction from him. Haste would spur him elsewhere, but it is muted for this short moment. "You will always be safe whenever I'm near."

Lucrezia interrupts whatever hushed response Cesare is about to give. She folds his fingers around the pouch of fragrant herbs. "You must drink this. Three times a day until the fever is gone and doesn't return."

"Do not let anyone take it," Micheletto adds. Any bodyguard worth the name would scour the room for whatever the false doctor left behind. It may be empty advice to a man in Cesare's condition. He can do no more.

"I... understand."

Footsteps, now, in the corridor. Micheletto goes to grab the chest of medicines: the things they've taken out must be counted as lost.

"One more thing." Cesare fumbles for his wrist. His grip is fever-wasted and tremulous. It holds Micheletto like a steel shackle. "I'm sorry."

He almost drops the chest, blinking at the fingers upon his sleeve, so much paler than they should be.

"There's a back staircase the servants use," Lucrezia says. Micheletto digs his focus into her words the way he does when preparing for a kill: uncompromising, strident, narrowed down to what matters in the moment.

They race through the rooms Cesare occupies in the palace, thankfully familiar ground to both of them. In the corridor they spend a harrowing minute crouching in a window alcove as a group of cardinals, debating fiercely in lowered voices, sweeps by their hiding place. The stairwell provides a momentary refuge, musty and ill-lit, as they scamper downwards.

The doorway below the turn in the stairs is guarded. The haft of a halberd, tilted forward a touch, slants out from behind a corner. Lucrezia jars into a halt, dread permeating her expression.

"We can't go back up! They'll have noticed by now. We'll be trapped."

"Not yet." Micheletto swings around to the high window in the middle of the stairwell. The latch must not have been opened for ages, for rust has eaten through the metal, but he wrests it loose after a few attempts. Slapping the rust specks from his fingers, he looks out to see a stretch of empty, sandy ground perhaps twice a man's height below him. "Follow me."

He drops down to hang from his fingers, then bends his body into the fall. The medicine chest jolts painfully against his shoulder. From behind Lucrezia, who leans out of the window with her face frozen in hesitation, he can hear shouting.

"Oh, goodness." She swings one leg over the sill. "How high is this?"

"I will catch you." That poses its own danger, but they're out of time. "Jump!"

She does, with a smothered scream. Her cap snags on the window latch and tears off, but she tumbles into his arms and he lurches back a couple of steps to manage the impact.

"Blessed Virgin," she gasps. "Are you all right?"

He only nods, pushes her back by the shoulders to check that she is unhurt, and tugs off his own hat. "Put this on. We have to go."

Even with her hands shaking, Lucrezia scoops her netted hair into the hat and pulls it low over her ears. That seems to restore a dose of calm to her. "Yes. This way."

"You have a way out of the Vatican, as well?" They both press to the wall to inch towards the nearest corner, for the first yells of their pursuers already carry from the open window above.

"There's a cellar passage," she says. "My brother showed me. I do hope they still haven't fixed the storage lock."

"I imagine it's fair," Micheletto says. They hasten across a largely abandoned loggia, hemmed on one side by the lush, trimmed gardens of the papal palace.

"What is--oh!" Pulling on his sleeve, Lucrezia draws him to crouch behind bushes planted in an artful semi-circle. Its twin arcs out opposite it, with a stone bench placed in the middle. A flock of alarmed page boys rush out of the door at the far end of the columnade.

"We had best make it quick." He doesn't dare peer past the foliage just now, but the heavier tread of armoured men echoes on the paved floor of the loggia.

"It's across the garden on the other side of the arbour, if we can make it." She's already crawling forward behind the screen that the bushes afford. "And what's fair?"

"Your brother's knowledge of the--" A part of him marvels at the things she would stop to inquire when they may well be fleeing for their lives. He sidles after her. "--The Vatican making possible our escape."

"Hardly." In the loggia, the guards have accosted the pages, who raise a dissonant chorus of frightened voices to protest that they have seen no one. Keeping her head low, Lucrezia darts the several steps to the arbour, which will conceal them for a minute.

"Hmm?" He presses in too close for any decorum as they cower into the leafy vines that drape the arbour.

"He fell ill in the first place. At least this debacle will make for a fine story to amuse Giulia."

"Once we get out."

"They're leaving." Lucrezia is right: the mingling voices of the boys and men are fading. "Let's go."

"Lead the way."

* * *

They slip out of the city on a pair of mules, in a market day throng flowing raggedly through the gates. Their mounts are far from ideal for swiftness, but they allow them to blend in the stream of common folk, as dusty and worn as they both are.

At Carbognano, the next day, Giulia Farnese murmurs a teasing remark about the manner of her arrival against Lucrezia's cheek as they embrace in greeting. Lucrezia huffs, then manages an elated laugh at Giulia's declaration that she's never seen a woman so in need of a bath.

Two days later the word ripples out from Rome, borne on the spurs of messengers on the fastest horses the Vatican can furnish: The Pope of Rome is dead. God preserve his soul. God preserve us.

Lucrezia returns from the courtyard cradling a letter in her hands. Micheletto waits out in the hallway, with the stillness of a man in the moment before bloodshed, while she reads it to Giulia and her mother. Vannozza hushes Giovanni in his game, holding him close.

Finally Lucrezia brings the slip of paper, covered in thick pen strokes that waver slightly at their ends, to Micheletto. Her eyes are suspiciously bright, but the beginnings of a tired, triumphant smile tug at her lips.

"He survived. He's recovering." She runs her finger down the page. "And here. The last line."

It takes him a while, letter by letter, until they fall into their proper places. Cesare's script concludes in, _Give Micheletto my regards._


	5. Peregrine

However precariously, the son of Alexander VI remains poised on the seat of his strength. The College of Cardinals is cloistered in the Vatican to decide on his successor, and when the voting is done, the name called out is a pope firmly in the palm of Duke Valentino's hand.

For a few precious weeks as autumn slips on, hope is sustained in the frail figure of Pope Pius III. While Lucrezia must continue home to Ferrara and her husband, Micheletto finds a roost with Lady Farnese to keep an ear to the ground closer to Rome. Lady Giulia receives him with her customary, cool demeanour, as if it simply entertained her to watch him--and Lucrezia--at this game they play around the fate of the papacy.

In truth, neither of them is a player, much as it might gall Lucrezia to admit that. They can only observe. The fortunes of Italy, and more keenly, Duke Valentino, turn upon the Vatican and the interlaced web of noble families, kinships and favours and rivalries that splays out from the papal palace.

From his sickbed and amid his undoubtedly onerous convalescence, Lord Borgia manoeuvres the situation to his advantage.

Micheletto ferrets out what he can, with the Vatican now largely closed to him. Concentrating on the outward affairs forces him to stay in the real and tangible.

 _I'm sorry._ From whom, of all the men and women under the sun, does Duke Valentino ask forgiveness? The words push at the wedged arrow, nudge by inexorable nudge, every day that he cannot banish them from his thoughts.

In early October Micheletto begins the lengthy journey north to Lucrezia and the relative lull of Castle Estense. A pope sits on the throne of Saint Peter that heeds Duke Valentino and his cadre of Spanish cardinals. Lord Borgia is establishing himself again in his titles, and his principal holdings are commanded by his faithful condottieri. Even without his father, he is making hold the foundations of his might.

Micheletto has done his part.

He sojourns in Florence for a few days before braving the passes of the Apennine Mountains. Following the flight of the Medici, Florence is regaining her stability in the wake of Savonarola's madness. For Micheletto, it will always be a city haunted and haunting. As soon as the last of the autumn storm has rolled down the mountain slopes to exhaust itself in the lowlands, he will leave.

He returns to his rented room on the last evening he plans to spend in Florence to find a man seated in the wicker chair by the window: dark of garb and narrow of face, and eminently familiar.

"Signor Corella?"

"Signor Machiavelli." He snaps his half-drawn knife back into the sheath.

Machiavelli accepts the address with a pensive dip of his head. In point of fact, it is him whose title for Micheletto ill suits his station, but Micheletto is accustomed to a degree of greyness in where others pin him. He again has a fixed pinnacle to steer himself by.

"You appear so at leisure--much as you ever are--that I must guess you haven't had the news."

"There's plenty of news to be had in your fair Florence. Which one do you mean?"

Machiavelli pauses, his gaze flickering to the window and the darkened street. "They are not calling it out in the squares yet, but it will not be long."

Micheletto makes a low sound. "I expect so, if it brings you all the way here. What should I prick my ears for?"

" ' _Habemus papam_ '," the other man says, equally quietly.

His blood grows cold. "The... there was only just an election."

"His former Holiness reigned for a total of twenty-six days." Machiavelli raises a brow, a slight nudge of movement. "I am unsure if that's the shortest papacy in history, but it must come close."

"But you said--there's a successor?"

"He has named himself Julius II. Rather apt, when one considers it."

Micheletto has a more urgent concern than the philosophical implications of the new papal title. " _Who_ , Signor Machiavelli?"

Something akin to sympathy tints Machiavelli's expression. "You knew him as Cardinal della Rovere."

Squeezing his eyes shut, Micheletto forces himself not to sway. Of all the names in the world that may be the one he hoped not to hear in answer. Giuliano della Rovere, one of the Borgia family's staunchest antagonists, who slipped their cage for a final time years ago. It's been a long time since Micheletto has been privy to the deeper secrets of the Vatican: he had learned of the cardinal's reappearance, but not the apparent extent of his influence.

"In fact, His Grace the Duke Valentino was instrumental in his election," Machiavelli says. "I believe the brief reign of Pius III taught him that it is not enough to have a pope amenable to him, the pope must have strength of his own."

Too much, Micheletto thinks, in the case of the erstwhile cardinal.

"And... His Grace?"

"That was my main point," says Machiavelli. "I arrived this morning to the news that His Grace has been apprehended by His Holiness. It may be the virtues of these titles do not extend to the conduct of their bearers."

Micheletto has to fight his face back under his control. Something hot and unthinking rushes in his ears: a longing to find his horse and turn back west and south as quickly as it can carry him.

Machiavelli, his expression rather more placid, goes on, "It might also be prudent for you to perform one of your... vanishing acts in short order."

"Me?"

"You are a well-known associate of His Grace, although more recent reports place you in his sister's employ. He has made several enemies with excellent memories."

"It isn't only His Grace," Micheletto says. "Are they arresting his condottieri? Seizing his cities?"

"How else would you crumble a base of power, Signor Corella?"

If nothing else, the new Pope has had ample time to spin this web--and Cesare has been occupied with schemes of his own. Too many of them did indeed lie upon the slowly slumping shoulders of his father.

"Then I must take my leave of you." It isn't as if he's even removed his cape.

"Then you agree? That you have a part to play in the fate of His Grace?"

Micheletto exhales, silent, constrained. "Perhaps. And you've given me a message I must carry."

"To Ferrara?"

"Yes." Little sense in hiding it. One barb remains, hooked into his mind, worrying at it. "I won't ask how you knew I was in Florence. If you wanted me to hear this, you didn't have to come yourself. So why?"

"Simply put, Signor Corella?" Machiavelli rises, his shadow shifting across the wall in the weak light of the candle lantern. "I am, in my way, fond of the Duke. It would vex him greatly if you came to harm. And this visit costs me little."

Surely that is only half the truth. If Machiavelli has been to Rome in person, the interests of Florence have accompanied him there.

"You may have spared me great grief, though." If Micheletto muses upon the possibilities, they are many and none of them are pleasant. In Cesare's service, he set himself athwart of Giuliano della Rovere more than enough times to be bitterly remembered. He dips into a proper bow, a touch awkward with lack of practice. "Thank you."

"I would say it is my pleasure," Machiavelli says, "but it would please me more to avoid being the bearer of bad news."

"Better you than the papal forces."

* * *

Micheletto must make all haste to Ferrara. Lucrezia will not be content to wring her hands and pray for her brother's deliverance. Even knowing that the delay will let the tidings reach Castle Estense before him, he steers his horse onto a smaller uplands road.

Forli has scarcely changed in the three years since Caterina Sforza's defeat. The great castle, the Rocca of Imola, is still governed by a Borgia loyalist, who has met the first demands of surrender by returning the envoys in a much sorrier state than that in which they left.

The house may have a shabbier ambiance than when Micheletto last visited. While the yard is tidy and meticulously swept, the thatched roof droops in the southern corner. He tethers his horse on a fence post in the yard and trails the sounds of clipped, rather inventive swearing to the chicken coop.

"Mother?" He arrives as he always does: alert and apprehensive, between care and caution.

"Blasted carrion bird thinks it can gobble up my chickens, it has another thing coming..." His mother is stringing a net over the weatherworn little hut. She stops to blow on her stiffened hands, then resumes her undertaking.

"Mama," Micheletto says, again.

A deep furrow appears between her thin, silvered eyebrows as she swings around towards him. How much older must he look, after five years? For she does, stooped and stubborn. Her eyes widen.

"My boy." The netting tumbles to the ground in a forgotten mesh of threads. His mother scurries up to him and takes his face in her wind-nipped hands, and he wraps her in a silent, clumsy embrace. "Oh, my Micheletto. Where in God's kingdom have you wandered?"

"Far and away," he says, more to himself. "I came to see you."

"As you well should!" She shakes him gently by the arms before stepping back. "I thought I'd be lying beside your father before I saw hide or hair of you again."

"I can't stay long this time, either." He could lie or hedge, but it doesn't change the truth. Whatever life there may once have been for him in Forli is long gone, trod into the mire of battlefields and the dust of distant roads. The farmers and artisans, blacksmiths and country priests of his birth town are not his ilk. _I do not have a kind._

But he has a mother, despite every sidestep and obfuscation he carries on around her, too.

"Well, then the least you can do is catch this thieving bag of feathers for me. Something's torn up two of my chickens."

Shaking his head, Micheletto goes to pick up the mess of netting. "That I can do."

"And your dottore business? It goes well?"

"Yes, Mama." He keeps his eye on the tangle in the net, lets his fingers feel out the best way to unravel it. "I was even called to the Vatican once."

"Fancy that," she says. "You will stay for supper."

He doesn't even pretend that is anything but the sternest of commands, and it is one he is glad to heed.

* * *

The cawing of the chickens brings Micheletto awake in his bed before the hearth. Fumbling his way into his cloak and boots, he strings his light hunting bow and ventures into the frosty morning.

A young chicken hawk, this summer's fledgling, is thrashing the net into a knot around itself. In the coop, the chickens chatter in a high terror. The hawk is a keening ball of talons and beating wings, uninjured but smothered by the netting.

Tugging a dagger from his belt, Micheletto gauges the best way to approach so as to avoid losing an eye. He begins gathering the edges of the net so he can trap the bird in the middle. In its blind panic, it makes his task easier: soon enough, he's pulled the net into a cinched sack in which the hawk hangs. It should be a simple matter, if one requiring a strong grip and a measure of reflexes, to wring its neck.

Instead, Micheletto takes his blade to the netting, until a severed sheet of it falls away. The bird, its wings loosened, totters from the trap and onto the withered grass of the yard.

He'll stay another day, he thinks, and fortify the damned coop instead. The carpentry has probably sat untended for years.

"Fly off, you fool creature."

After a few disoriented hops, the hawk flaps into the air in a flurry of downy feathers. With a piercing, sorrowful scream, it disappears beyond the wind-gnarled treetops.


	6. A Winter's Journey

  
_You pitched your moon-tent on the night's dark depth;_  
 _then threw water on Reason as he slept._  
 _Your lullaby promises set dreams afloat,_  
 _and then, with goodbye's knife, you cut sleep's throat._

\-- Rumi (tr. Zara Housmand)

* * *

Among the wind battering the shutters, something shifts in the hallway, all but lost in the ambient noises of the castle. Micheletto has couched himself in a chair between two columns, wrapped in a rough quilt against the draft. There's a cot for him on a lower floor of Castle Estense, but he has slept in catnaps for years. Something pulled him from a doze. Gone from a brother's right-hand man to a sister's bodyguard as he has, he knows this particular premonition. It is older than his service to the Borgia family.

A footfall, a breath. A presence where there should be only the nighttime quiet.

Since her husband lies abed with an egregious bout of head cold, Lucrezia has withdrawn to her own rooms tonight. Micheletto dashes around to the door her maids use, startling one out of her sewing. Lowering the shirt in her lap, Ghita begins to stand up, then freezes at Micheletto's warding hand.

"Stay here," he mouths.

Two candles cast a sphere of tawny light around Lucrezia, seated at her desk, bundled in a shawl and deep in her reading. The desk is littered with books and papers. She must be formulating another letter to Spain, where her brother remains in prison after more than a year. Some nights, Micheletto sits up with her, when keeping company through the dark hours becomes easier than spending them in sleepless solitude.

Crouched down, Micheletto slips up to the bed, draped with its heavy winter canopy to keep the sleepers' warmth in, using its shadow to conceal himself. Avoiding the candlelight to let his eyes sharpen to the dark, he scours the corners and walls for any sign that something is amiss.

The high chair on the far side of Lucrezia's desk has acquired a rather greater bulk than in daylight. Before Micheletto can deliberate any further, the man detaches from his hiding place. He stalks towards Lucrezia with honed agility, his hands bent to the width of his own shoulders.

That is a garotte grip. Micheletto bounds over the bed, heedless of his thumping footfalls, for he is already shouting. Lucrezia's chair tilts backwards with a crash of wood as the would-be assassin seizes the back and upsets it with a vigorous pull. She screams, but Micheletto is set on another target. He brings the dagger up in a backhand grip and slashes straight down, into the space in front of the man.

The metal wire rips from his grip, rent in two, though Micheletto's dagger will have a notch for his trouble. Then the man dives at him, and Micheletto realises that in a sheer show of strength, he will be the lesser party. His opponent has roughly a head of height on him, and a handspan in the shoulders. The shove barrels him back a few steps before he can brace himself, and his dagger hand is pinned awkwardly to his side.

Apparently realising that Micheletto has planted his feet, the other man hoists him up and throws him bodily backwards. His shins colliding with the bed, he teeters into the heaped pillows at the head of it. His dagger slips from his fingers.

On the upside, his hands are free. As the man looms into the space of the bed, Micheletto cups his hands and slaps them soundly on either side of his head.

The stunning effect is less than he hoped. With a fierce shake of his head, the assassin renews his offensive. The bed yields under Micheletto, fouling his balance. He tosses a pillow into the man's face, clawing at his hip for another knife. Then strong fingers fist into his collar, haul him forward and wrap around his throat. Micheletto tries to shove a foot into his groin or stomach, only to be thwarted by the angle. A grating, reflexive noise breaks from him.

The bedposts groan, and there is a long rip of tearing fabric. As his assailant swings around, a swath of cloth is pulled hard around his head. Gasping, Lucrezia crosses the ends of the length of canopy she has torn free, and tugs them in opposite directions.

In spite of the sparks dancing in his eyes, Micheletto fumbles a knife from its sheath and opens the man's throat.

"Oh, goodness." Lucrezia releases her hold, letting the man sag against the bed to gurgle out his last damp breath.

"My lady." Micheletto masters himself by degrees. Her well-being comes with the first notch of composure. "Are you all right?"

"I have a bruise," she huffs. "And my bed is covered in blood. I'm fine."

"Good," Micheletto says. "Because the more pertinent question is, where are his accomplices? It'd be quite the feat to get inside the castle on his own."

"My husband," she breathes. Giovanni, at least, is visiting with his grandmother, and thus out of the way of this immediate harm. Micheletto knows Lucrezia's union with Alfonso d'Este is far from a love match, and others share her bed and her company on occasion, but the fright in her voice is piercing.

"He came up the south stairs." That is the only way the assailant would have averted passing him in the corridor. "There may still be time."

Lucrezia knots the belt of her robe, turning towards the side room. "Ghita! Raise the guard! To my husband's chambers!"

Even though her eyes go round at the grisly display of the body, Ghita has a level head on her shoulders. She whisks from the room already calling out to whichever watchmen are within earshot.

"My lady, you should stay--"

"I think it's been amply demonstrated that wherever you are is the safest place for me." Lucrezia juts out her chin.

"Then, for the love of God, at least stay behind me." He doesn't waste another word, but hurries into the hallway, with Lucrezia following close behind.

They burst into the bedroom of Alfonso d'Este to find a castle guard holding a second assassin at swordpoint, while another watchman busies himself with binding the man hand and foot. Lucrezia flies to her husband's side, to exchange a burst of words that gradually melt into quiet, tender ones.

When even those are done, and the surviving assassin has been carted off to the dungeon and Ghita has tasked herself with making her lady's chambers comfortable again, Lucrezia finally emerges into the hallway. Her eyes are a touch red, but the resolute set of her jaw has not relaxed.

"I _will_ know who did this."

"It is only a matter of time." Micheletto settles for walking a step behind her. To his knowledge Alfonso d'Este is more fond of music and poetry than the more esoteric extremes of human pain, but he is a duke. Someone in the castle will pry the secret of his employer from the attacker.

Someone, he finds himself thinking.

Lucrezia eyes him sideways, her mouth ajar. Her purposeful gait gentles. "Of course," she says. "I... find myself quite unable to sleep. I should like to sit in the library for a while."

Micheletto says nothing for the space of twenty stairs, as they climb down. "Do you mean that you have a midnight fancy to hear me stumble over ancient poetry?"

"Only Italians, you have my word." Her mock solemnity only cracks a little.

"Then I believe I may not refuse."

Lucrezia does not laugh, but he reads her amusement--and, perhaps, her gratitude--in her rippling exhalation.

* * *

"His brothers," Lucrezia seethes. "His _brothers_ were behind this."

Micheletto stands back against the edge of the window alcove where she's sitting, aware that her surging ire is not directed at him. Her moods have moved unpredictably in the days since the attack, from intense rumination to these snaps of icy spleen. As violent as the world she inhabits is, as well as she knows that her station will bring these games for power with it, the incident seems to have unsettled her.

"They'll be caught soon," he says. "Your lord husband is not likely to grant them anything but the harshest judgment he can."

"Yes. Yes, I know." She tucks her hands against her mouth. "And... there was little love lost between Juan and me. I wished him dead. I won't gainsay that."

"Love is one thing, a blood tie another. I learned that long ago."

Her expression clouds, as she turns inward after some kindled thought he cannot yet begin to discern. 

"I agree," she says at last. "And... perhaps it is time we did something for the sake of both."

"You need only ask."

"I shall have to ask." She lifts her hand, and quite easily, he offers his own to support her as she slides down from the windowsill. "Beginning with my lord husband."

Micheletto allows himself a slight, expectant cant of his head.

"If all goes well, we shall head to Spain."

* * *

The Ligurian Sea lies under milky mist on the cusp of that morning. The old night has withdrawn into the west, and daybreak is shading the fog in amber. In the upstairs rooms of a harbourside inn, they have been awake for most of the night. Long-cooled cups of mulled wine, of which Lucrezia has sipped slowly and Micheletto hardly at all, still exude a faint tang of spices into the air.

"I wish it were a different world," Lucrezia is curled into her chair in a near-girlish way, her feet on the seat, her long skirts concealing them. "One in which I could come with you."

"You have a duchy and a husband waiting for you." The haze of long wakefulness seems to be making Micheletto uncommonly candid. As is his habit, he stands, leaning over the table. "We each have our duties, my lady."

"Duties? Is that what this is?" She taps her finger against the sheaf of papers she has amassed on the table: letters, lists, maps. A bound volume of her favourite sonnets lies next to them, the double of a book on her shelf in Ferrara. She went to some pains to procure it back in Genoa.

"What do you mean?" He sharpens.

"I wonder," she says. "We are here to try and free my brother. There is nothing more I can do, since the king will not grant me an audience. Cesare is being taken to the castle of La Mota. It's a place for people whose hopes have run dry."

"If there was no hope, we would hardly be here."

"What I meant is that I've exhausted my means, Micheletto." She smiles through the shadows under her eyes. "But you will carry on."

The information, the book, the carefully wrapped bag of coin, are to furnish his journey across Spain.

"And, having to leave the task in your hands, I was curious as to why." Idly she toys with a curl of her hair.

"My lady..."

"Don't do that. You always do that when I throw you for a loop."

"I... may have no answer that will satisfy you."

"Do you have one to satisfy yourself?" Her eyes are, unexpectedly, soft and sympathetic. Thankfully there is no trace of pity in them. That he could not bear. "You see so keenly into others and so little into yourself."

He drops to sit in a chair, heavily, its legs scraping the floor.

"Do you remember when you left my brother's service?" At his tight nod, she goes on, "I sought you out because--among other reasons--my brother had hurt you. You _stayed_ with me for another sentiment, I do believe."

His fretful hands grasp a cup, and he drinks down the tepid wine only because it allows him a moment to tame his bucking thoughts. He could claim that employment was employment: his service to her has been the most clement spell in his life.

The answer may lie there, but if it is so, why is he departing now? Lucrezia has, on every count he can imagine, been good to him. Ferrara has been a shelter from the storms sweeping Italy--and the stranger tempests within himself.

"Is that what you wish to know? Why I stayed in your employ?"

"Not precisely." She picks up her own cup, peering into it thoughtfully. "I am satisfied on that. But you are leaving my employ. If this plan succeeds, if my brother can be freed..."

The realisation trembles through him as if he were a resonant bell.

"I will bring him back. If there is a way on this earth."

Lucrezia laughs. "I suppose that must be my answer."

He gathers the things on the table, tucking them into his satchel one by one.

"The Count of Benavente is my brother's staunchest supporter," she says. "Don't lose the letter. He will help you when you get to Villalon. He'll know others who can be brought into the plan, too."

She has said it all before, and he remembers, but she appears to find comfort in the retread. Moreover, his own head is a touch blurry with the ruminations of the night.

"I had best go now, before the harbour wakes."

She collects herself from the chair, rising to her full height. "I will at least see you to the door."

Too soon, his preparations are at an end. She requested rations from the inn kitchen, and once he's shouldered the bag, there is nothing to more to be done. They take the stairs down in silence. The first stubborn shafts of dawn creep in through the dim windows.

"Write whenever you can," she tells him. His script will never be smooth, but he will make the endeavour for her.

Taking her hand, Micheletto puts his chapped lips to the back of it, lifts his eyes to her steely, sorrowful smile. She presses it to his forehead in turn, his head cradled in her hands.

"God speed your way."

"My lady."

She has been, and she is. The foreign warmth of gratitude kindles in him as he watches her wave in farewell, limned in the scant morning light.


	7. Unchained

  
_Let the clock-hands end their circling;_  
 _in accord sun cease his ancient roundabout endeavor,_  
 _so I might have, certain-sure,_  
 _\--though not procured by my own worth--_  
 _my long desired sweet lord_  
 _in my unworthy but eager arms, forever._

\-- Michelangelo Buonarotti (tr. Leonard Cottrell)

* * *

Micheletto has gone through his life without much consideration for the future. It happens day by day, and any grand designs it holds are not his own. His role is to take part in the plans of others at most.

The war in Spain gouged its scars deep into him and taught him most of the arts that have sustained him since. What he knows of peace he learned from a dagger-sharp, astonishing woman he has now left behind.

His sojourn in Spain stretches out longer than either he or Lucrezia could have assessed when they laid out the bare bones of a scheme in a harbour town on the eastern coast. Her good word carries him into the circle of men--and women--who still hold to the cause of Duke Valentino. They serve kings and lords of their own: Ferdinand of Aragon, Louis of France, John of Navarre. Each of these rulers harbours some opinion on the glorious upstart of House Borgia who blazed through the Italian peninsula like summer lightning. It is only that Cesare refuses to sputter out, and even behind locks and bars, he has those who would feed the flame.

As smoothly as Micheletto may be received, and as much as his knowledge of clandestine methods and matters comes to be valued, he stands apart from the rest of Lord Borgia's partisans. 

They each have a use for the imprisoned Duke Valentino. He's a strategic genius, a charismatic leader, a bold warrior: such a man would find a place under many a discerning liege lord. Much as Micheletto lent his arm and his wit to Cesare's cause, thus would these nobles bind him to theirs. And Cesare would be bound. His titles and lands have been stripped from him in captivity. His letters, however, brim with resolutions, devices and prospects.

Micheletto answers the missives in a painstaking, precise hand that limbers gradually as the months pass. He writes when some new facet comes to light, or a situation changes. Never a word spent in vain, on sentiment or idle musing. The scheme is shaping into a viable one, though less speedily than any of his allies, or the subject and other chief instigator of it, would prefer.

Micheletto, too, has a purpose, and he must keep to it.

* * *

The central tower of La Mota Castle looms above the two waiting men, speckled with arrow slits at regular intervals. Micheletto leans on the wall, his eyes and his hopes pinned on the dark divot of the single window. The height of it rivals the treetops beyond the outer curtain wall.

Beside him, the chaplain, the man on Lord Borgia's staff who brought Micheletto in through the postern gate, is growing anxious. They left the Duke's tetchy kinsman behind with the horses, with stern reminders that if their mounts are apprehended, the rescue is moot.

For a rescue it is. The plan has been months in the making.

The pale coil of a rope blossoms from the window, falling until it hangs straight down on the near-vertical wall. Micheletto nearly swears when it stops: the end is still a good four or five arm-spans above the ground. A shape clambers out of the window, beginning a laborious descent.

Another follows, with brisker movements, gaining on the first. They are too far up to hear, and a shout will alert the guards. Micheletto can spy one making a routine from one mural tower to another, occasionally visible in the gaps of the crenellated battlement. The darkness is their only method of securing this most vulnerable phase of the flight.

So he stares up and prays to a God that has not heard him in thirty-seven years.

The first man--too broad of shoulder to be Cesare--reaches the end of the rope. He yelps as his fingers meet the knotted tail.

Micheletto sees the briefest of glints in the height. A helmet, a blade, it does not matter.

"They're cutting the rope!"

The first man tumbles. He lands with a sickening crunch, screaming his agony at a pitch that will wake the whole thrice-damned keep. The second braces his foot on the rough brick, swings sideways, dangerously, foolhardily, and digs his fingers into the rim of an arrow slit to his right.

A heartbeat later, the rope comes whipping down, loop upon loop, onto the courtyard.

A staggered line of arrow slits runs up the wall: Cesare clings to the second lowest one, at a drop that will shatter bone if he falls.

"Help me up!" Micheletto snaps to the chaplain. "Let me stand on your shoulders. We must get him down." Over the priest's protests, he herds the man to the wall, then steps up, finding handholds in the aged tile, crevices in the mortar where his fingers can grip. Grunting, he sets his foot onto the lowermost arrow gap. And comes up short. His hand barely skims Cesare's boot.

He looks up, wishes he could pierce the darkness. "I can slow your fall. You can catch yourself. Do you hear me?"

"I hear you." The strain glows through in the words.

"Good." Micheletto braces himself. "Now."

Cesare releases his hold. His cape tears through Micheletto's fingers, but he seizes his arm--and lets go barely short of Cesare's weight ripping him from his perch. There's a hard thud and a familiar noise of effort. With a harsh effort of his own, Micheletto manoeuvres himself to grip the cusp of the arrow hole and drops down.

Cesare stands up, on precarious feet, just before Micheletto drags him close, two-handed, panting with the surge of everything.

"I have you," Micheletto mutters. His hands are damp with sweat in his gloves. His tension leaks out, against his will, however he tries to quell it. "I have you." On the dead ground, hidden from the tower's myriad of staring eyes, he clutches Cesare to him until the other has his ragged breathing under a degree of control.

"Micheletto," he says, as if to be certain.

"Your Grace, " the chaplain says, urgent. He has bent down to examine the groaning man--a servant, Micheletto surmises. "His legs are broken."

"Then leave him." Micheletto unbuckles his sword and holds it out to Cesare, who slips it into his belt without another word. The frigid air reveals their breath in white puffs of mist.

The drawbridge lies only across the courtyard, but a shout is going up in the high window and ringing round the parapets. The keep that adjoins the tower will soon swarm with archers. Micheletto doesn't let himself consider the chance of matchlocks. Their way out lies in the lee of the curtain wall either way. The postern gate is beyond the tower to the right, while the lowered drawbridge can be glimpsed, under the near-full moon, to their left. The shadowed arc of the gatehouse leads towards it.

"Which way?" He looks at the chaplain.

"Back to the side gate, Signor Corella--ah!"

A crossbow bolt whirrs through the air, fired from the roof of the keep. The angle is poor; at this distance they must be only smudges of shadow in the archer's sight. The chaplain's yell will no doubt help him align his next shot.

"Right along the wall," Micheletto hisses. Cesare has the sword out, and his long captivity has hopefully not dulled his reflexes. Taking the lead, Micheletto unsheathes his dagger. He will also have to rely on his speed and agility against whatever opposition they encounter.

He comes face to face with the first of their adversaries as they round the steep corner of the keep tower. A guard is approaching along the wall. He carries no lantern, trusting, as their small party does, in his night vision and the moon rather than a flame that will blind him to everything beyond its light.

Micheletto stops the other two with a sharp hand gesture, then flattens himself to the wall. A powerful yank at the guard's armoured shoulder hauls him close enough, face to face with Micheletto. A hand on his mouth smothers his yell, and the slim blade of the dagger plunges into his eye. He thrashes for a while, until Micheletto can fit the blade under his chain coif to slice his throat.

"There'll be more," he mutters. Soldiers in their metal and mail. He almosts asks Cesare to return his sword.

"That's the way to the postern gate." There's a horrified undertow to the chaplain's voice.

"We need another--"

Before Micheletto can finish, Cesare spins upon his heel at the rush of running feet from behind them. As the runner passes a patch of moonlight, the bulk of his form also turns out to be guard armour. Cesare catches his first overhand strike, then cuts a deft slash along his unprotected leg.

"Quiet him!" Micheletto snarls. The response is both more rapid and more decisive than he had hoped. None of them are encumbered by extra gear, but it also tilts any skirmishes against them.

"I see them!" The moment they break from the tower wall, there will be bolts trained on them.

He makes a swift, brash decision. From this point, the tower will protect them from the archers on the keep roof. There are soldiers in the courtyard darkness ahead, but they will be armed with swords and spears.

"Get into the mural tower!" There must be a stair or at least a ladder to reach the ramparts.

"Do you want me to jump this time, too?" Cesare huffs.

"No, only go down the outer wall as fast as you can. You're not the only one to have procured rope." A crossbow bolt clatters into the stone a handspan from his head. They've been seen from the outer wall. The advantage of their position is dwindling. "Go!"

It may be the most harrowing thirty steps he has ever run. Even though the keep's shadow falls thick and impenetrable on this side, foiling all but the keenest of archers, he hunches over as he sprints. The round tower ahead is the only thing he permits himself to see: not Cesare, not the chaplain, as long as he can hear their pounding feet.

Cesare reaches the door ahead of him and wrenches it open. Inside, a guttering torch lines out a spiralling staircase going up through a hatch in the tower ceiling. Micheletto ducks inside when their third companion makes a spasmodic noise and collapses, the fletches of a crossbow bolt jutting from the back of his neck.

Slamming the bolt on the door home, Micheletto dashes up the stairs.

At the upper end, a guard concealed in the doorway plunges a spear down towards him. The tip scores through his jacket and the strap of the bag bound across his body, sears against his ribs, and nearly levers him off the stairwell. The bundle falls from his back. Reaching past him, Cesare grabs the spear-haft just below the head and hauls on it crudely. On his knees, Micheletto gasps his way through the pain to see the guard dragged down to the stairs. The spear falls, clattering and rebounding. Cesare sidles past him to kick the dazed guardsman down after his weapon.

Above them, a shadow moves across the hatchway.

"Watch out!" By the time Micheletto calls out, Cesare is leaping the rest of the stairs. There's a screech of steel across chain links, then the more satisfying punch of a swordpoint through them. Micheletto spares an instant to his bleeding side. The ribs are bruised, not broken. It hurts, and he will be in agony later, but for now he can move. He struggles up to find Cesare pulling his borrowed blade from the throat of a second guard.

"I have you," he says, wiping the blood on the hem of his cape.

Eyes narrowed, his heart in his throat, Micheletto only nods.

"You're bleeding."

"We must get out. Your kinsman waits in the trees with the horses." He focuses on drawing shallow enough breaths. He does not relish the thought of descending the curtain wall.

"We have a moment." Cesare peers out onto the battlement from the doorway at the top of the mural tower.

"The bag." Micheletto gestures. "Rope. And a grappling hook. Bolt the hatch when you come back up."

Cesare returns a brief moment later, dragging the bag, and still Micheletto has to look him over. In the dim night, he has yet to get a clear sight of him, but he is there. Cesare unwinds the neatly coiled rope.

"Where do you want to fix it? Between the crenellations?"

"Safest course, if not by much." He presses against the wall. From their vantage, the sounds of splintering wood are audible. The tower door will not hold for long.

Cesare hammers the hook into a spot of worn masonry in a gap in the battlement. "It reaches the plinth," he says. "Can you climb the moat with that wound?"

Micheletto grimaces. "If I can't, you know what to do."

"Do I?" Cesare sounds dry, brittle.

Before Micheletto can think of anything to say, Cesare has grasped the rope and is sliding down out of his sight.

In the end, he climbs. They scamper up the far side of the ditch on little more than sheer grit and will. The treeline encases them, limping shadows among the greater ones of the woods. At Cesare's demand, they stop for long enough for him to wrap Micheletto's side with strips of his cloak. Less blood to drip onto the night-frosted ground.

Supporting one another in turns, they stumble into the clearing with the waiting horses, worn-out and free under the setting moon.

* * *

At the end of a night's hard riding, cross-country when they can, along side roads and game paths when needed, their small company arrives at Benavente Estate. The estate outbuildings dive out of the morning fog in crouched, dusky impressions. The wet chill may be all that keeps Micheletto awake.

The introductions at the door drift past him to sink into the mire of his own exhaustion. Count Benavente's deep voice is warm as he greets Cesare, who simmers under his weariness with thoughts of the future. They seem to spout from him in scattered words and intimations whenever he forgets himself.

Liberty. Perhaps a man can be intoxicated by it as by wine or battle.

Cesare does pause when Micheletto makes to rise from his chair at the dining table and falters, balancing himself on the back of his seat.

"Does it still hurt?" 

Benavente found a surgeon to look over their injuries first thing, and a change of bandages and a poultice dulled the beating ache. Micheletto shakes his head. "I will live."

"You're not well."

"The wound is clean," he says, in a more clipped tone than he's ever been wont to use with Cesare. "I'll recover."

"The hour is late, Your Grace," Benavente cuts into their exchange. "Or rather, late for you and early for the rest of us. You may be at ease in this house."

"You are a most gracious host." Cesare gives a solemn nod--something of the courtier's deftness of bearing remains in him. "We may have to impose on you for a time. Micheletto should not ride until he's recovered."

Micheletto, who has conversed with Benavente often and at length in the laying of the escape plan, bends his head quickly, too. Something galls him, a kink in his mind he cannot quite tease out. Cesare is, as he is wont to be, at the crux of it, but there is no returning to their early, smooth byplay.

"I fear His Grace is right. I'll be of better use with some rest."

Benavente turns to summon a servant to show them to the guest rooms. Cesare moves forward, extending his arm. Reluctantly, Micheletto allows him to take some of his weight as they leave the dining room.

* * *

A week passes with them lingering in Villalon, sleeping away the aches and stresses of their flight. For the first time in seven years, Micheletto sees more of Cesare than a fleeting, fractured impression, beset by circumstance.

Sometimes, in these days, even the sight of Cesare burns in him like a half-mended wound, a chip of steel sunken into bone, jarring a nerve.

Whenever Micheletto hobbles into the study Cesare has claimed on the upper floor of the estate, he is poring over some matter of seemingly profound importance: a spread-out map or a carefully eloquent letter. Names flicker rapid and weighty in the late-night discussions waged in the study or in Benavente's library.

Setting aside his pursuit of allies or assets, Cesare traces Micheletto from head to toe with a thoughtful eye. Then, after Micheletto has gingerly sat down, he launches into a complaint over the French king, who has flatly denied Cesare permission to present himself at the court. Not even the influence of his faraway wife appears to sway the monarch. Or, alternately, Cesare seeks Micheletto's opinion on the movement of the troops milling along the Pyrenean range.

Micheletto sits across the corner of Cesare's desk and answers his queries with care. Dispels the fever dream that ghosts along his senses when, for a breathless instant, Cesare makes sure of him in the doorway.

The accord between them feels fragile and treacherous as spring ice, when snowmelt shifts the planes locked by frost.

"Well," Cesare declares, drawing a flourish with his hand. "This morning I was spurned by His Majesty again, but I have been asked to come to Pamplona by another royal. Not an altogether wasted day."

"Which one is it?" Micheletto stamps down the rebellious swell of unease in his chest. The great and the good of most any country seem eager for war at the flimsiest chance of glory or gain. Cesare may have crossed most of the rulers that might play a part in his destiny, but it was only a matter of time before one would come along whose opportunism preceded his nursing of grievances.

"My brother-in-law," Cesare says. "John of Navarre."

"His Aragonese rebels are on the move?" There is a wayward contingent of lords in Navarre who would rather be ruled by the Most Catholic Majesty of Ferdinand of Aragon. Trouble has been brewing in the kingdom for quite some time.

"He needs a captain."

And Cesare, Cesare would swear his sword to anyone that gave him a chance to scramble back to wealth and influence. 

"It seems a simple matter to me." Micheletto shrugs, relieved that the movement doesn't set off a flash of hurt in his side.

Cesare frowns. "That is it?"

 _That_ \--Micheletto's affectation of equilibrium--is the dam that holds back a flood.

"Was there something more you needed?" He shifts in his chair again, itching to stand, to move. "I've never met the man. He is your kin by marriage." If one should speak of it as such, given how little mind Cesare has paid his spouse, or how tarry she seems in any attempt at a reunion. Years of absence may change many things.

That is a truth Micheletto finds himself contending with, too.

"And..." He swallows. "This king could well be the means to your end. The best chance you've had so far, certainly."

"He could, or he might not," Cesare says. "I used to think fortune was for those who grasped it first."

"Then... something bothers you about this offer?"

"No." Cesare whirls to face him, in a snapping, hawkish motion. " _You_ , on the other hand, bother me greatly at the moment."

Micheletto almost balks at the wave of his displeasure, then firms himself against it. "If I've given offence, it is your right to..."

"Is it?" Cesare insists. "My sister sent you to Spain to free me. That is done and done well."

"I hold your sister in the highest esteem," Micheletto cuts in tersely. "But she did not send me here." It is an utter presumption to even consider what he is putting to words, but in the final tally, that is how the matter lies. "I came by choice. Hers and mine."

Cesare makes a curious, throaty noise. "Here I was, remembering how you _chose_ to stay in her service."

"Always, when I may."

"By all the saints, Micheletto!" Flying onto his feet, Cesare casts his hands wide. "We're going in circles! This is it. This is the moment. Maybe the only moment. I throw my lot in with this king, and we no longer need to skulk under the charity of others." Then he deflates, and something constricts his words. "But I need to know."

He looks tired--fallible, mortal. Micheletto knows that Cesare Borgia is a man like any other: stabbed between the ribs, he'd bleed to death. Faster, if you cut his throat. Gradually over days of agony, if the blade went into his guts.

Yet it seems to him that for the first time, Cesare is within his _reach_ , in the sphere of his own being.

"When I last took an order from you..." Speaking is like hauling on a door that has rusted shut.

"When you left." Cesare speaks barely audibly.

"I did the only thing I could." Micheletto inclines forward in the chair. "The only thing short of failing you."

Cesare's silence is tinged with bewilderment. "You _left_ out of _loyalty_?" he says at last.

"That is one way of putting it."

"Then... why did you ever return?"

Micheletto would have killed at his word again and again. But since Cesare would not wield it, he would have sought the blade that ended him. A man without a will to live makes for a poor right hand for a prince.

"I found a place with Lady Lucrezia, and she was kind enough to let me stay." It is surely the most straightforward truth spoken in this conversation--and it covers the most complex one, the one Micheletto has never held up to the light, but which does, in the end, light his own path forward.

"That's not an answer." If Micheletto has found some solid ground, Cesare seems to falter in turn.

"Then thank your sister for her grace, and don't dwell upon it."

"Damn you," Cesare mutters, without heat, without venom. "And damn you twice." As if his legs simply folded from under him, he splays back into his chair. "So. If I do take the offer..."

The question hangs in the air, resounding so that Micheletto realises only a moment later that Cesare never spoke it. Impetuous, changeable Cesare, who does not hesitate, does not admit defeat, sits unmoving, his hands curled on the armrests of his chair.

"My lord--" He almost trips over the words, in a paltry try to restore some part of what has tumbled down during this exchange.

"Don't call me that." Cesare's shoulders clench. "You haven't done that since La Mota. Don't dare start now."

"Precisely speaking, you have no titles."

"I have a _name_."

Something judders in him, a hard, shaky shifting, at the direct, unswaying look Cesare gives him. In the end, when he has roamed through the last years, bearing his shadows, learning to walk in their company, all those paths have taken him down to this room, this day, this man.

"Cesare," Micheletto says, meeting his eye. "And yes, I will come with you."


	8. A Little Earth

  
_We speak another language, not this tongue._  
_There's another home that's not your heaven or hell._

\-- Rumi (tr. Zara Houshmand)

* * *

Close to the end of the year, Cesare rides to Pamplona, the seat of his first bishopric two decades ago. There, he finds a protector and a liege in Jean d'Albret, King John III of the beleaguered state of Navarre.

The heart of winter sees Cesare again at the head of a fighting force, if one comprised of local men. The highlands of Navarre are rugged, broad country, inhabited by people as stolid as their sky-creeping hills.

Luis de Beaumonte, a chief partisan of Ferdinand of Aragon, sits in his fortress at Viana and refuses to budge. The envoy sent by the king does not return. Beaumonte dispatches a man of his own to declare that the good delegate is fond enough of the comforts of the Viana dungeons that he has decided to stay, and thus the commander has extended his hospitality.

Then the weather, already bad in the lee of the mountains, unleashes a deluge of rains over Viana Castle and the walled town.

"By the breasts of the Virgin," Cesare grouses, shaking water from his hood and cloak. He has commandeered a spacious stone house for his headquarters, and the tiled eaves run with the abundant rain. "They can't even manage a decent spring in these backlands."

"You'll have to take that up with a higher estate than me." Micheletto comes down the stairs with deliberate steps: the wet makes the old spear wound in his calf ache. "The perimeter's clear as far as the scouts can tell."

Long ago, Cesare would have clad him in armour and given him a place of honour among his generals. Now, he has no suit of mail, and Cesare's inner circle has dwindled to him and a handful of other steadfast men, but here he is, minding the rough soldiers of the force Cesare heads.

"Even the little Navarrese can't stomach his own weather." Cesare raps his fingers on a staircase column. "It'll mean a calmer night for us, but he is waiting for something."

They have sat at a deadlock with the enemy for some days, neither side making a move.

"Something other than the opportunity to reap us like tassels of grain and let his war horses thresh the chaff from us?" Micheletto does spare his audacity for the times they are alone; this time it is marred by acute concern. The Navarrese are a stubborn people, and pitted against each other, they seem all but inexorable.

Cesare snorts. "That's a charitable view of Beaumonte's strength."

"And a more true one than the king holds." He pitches his voice low. Cesare is his glowing, quicksilver self, spinning one stratagem into another only to turn both onto their heads, and he seldom pauses in the tread and retread of his plans. But the constant activity cannot mask the wear in him. This civil war may as well be a last holdout as a new beginning.

 _I will come with you._ What else was there to be done?

"Micheletto." The difference between a demand and an entreaty is narrow for Cesare. His name now could be either.

"I am not doubting you," he says.

"Only this venture?"

"I wonder what it will cost you." And Micheletto himself. "You can ply me with the same assurances you give the others. You have cracked thicker walls than those of Viana Castle. I know."

"Then what, my friend?" Cesare's worry may well be genuine. Micheletto still has trouble walking this new balance that lives between them, more candid and more precarious.

"I lied," Micheletto sighs, feeling himself shaken by the one thing that can steady him, orient him in the tumult of the world. "This was never a simple matter."

"Now you tell me, when we are hip-deep into a siege." They may well be hip-deep in blood before the winner is told. Even then, the reach of Ferdinand of Aragon is much broader than that of John of Navarre.

"I don't mean that."

The crux of his sentiment does not stem from any worldly thing: it stands before him. And then, because words do not come, there is no poetry in him, no blessing or curse or plea, Micheletto sinks his fingers into Cesare's sleeves, clasps his arms and backs him up against the column.

Hovering near enough for his shallow breaths to mingle with Cesare's soft, amazed exhalation, he comes to a halt. Cesare stays utterly still. A tension vibrate in his muscles, in his loosely curled fists: a readiness to react.

"You may triumph here," Micheletto mutters. "And in the next battle, and the next. But the world is what it is, and it is not as we want. There will come something that will be the match of you, Cesare Borgia.

"Do you understand?" He tracks his thumb over Cesare's jaw, strokes a slow, shivering line across his lower lip. " _I_ am not ready. Not after all this time."

"I lived a Borgia," Cesare says, "so is there a way other than dying a Borgia?" Unfurling his hand, Cesare lays it on Micheletto's chest, over his heart, the tips of his fingers furrowing the cloth, warm down to the skin.

* * *

It is not yet dawn when an alarm goes up, in one confused, fraught voice after another, along the town perimeter.

Rudely hauled from a too-short sleep, Micheletto comes running down the stairs to find a group of the local troops in heated argument in the entryway. He struggles into the light cuirass he conceded to wearing, as a degree of protection in a melee, while shouting for someone to give him a coherent report. He snatches a matchlock from the rack by the door and ties a pouch of shot and a powder horn onto his belt. The rain is letting up.

Beaumonte soldiers have broken through the perimeter under cover of the storm. No one knows their exact numbers or arms, but sentries have been killed in more than one position. Someone has led an answering vanguard out towards the rebels from Viana. Micheletto is buckling on his sword belt amid a swelling clamour of disoriented men and pressed officers, when a youth pelts down the lane towards the camp headquarters, a helmet tucked under his arm.

Micheletto recognises Cesare's squire.

"My lord--my lord has--"

"He has what, boy?" Dread hardens his voice.

"He led out a force," Juanito gasps. "There was a report of Beaumonte soldiers, and he rode out before I'd even..." He seems to realise what he's carrying, and holds up the helmet as if it could conclude his sentence for him.

It can. It is Cesare's.

"Which way?"

Juanito flinches, whether at his face or his growl. "Straight north of town. The--the ground..."

The terrain is bad even in fair weather. The storm will have turned it into a field of traps. Micheletto bellows at the general confusion as if he could force order out of it simply by the power of his voice. "Bring me a horse!"

* * *

The horse he is brought is neither the swiftest nor the most sure-footed in the camp, but it is the first whose reins are shoved into his hand. He spins the animal towards the north gate, leaving the groom scarcely enough time to duck its flying hooves. In the torch-speckled twilight, the forces of King John strive to amass an organised counteroffensive. Micheletto urges his mount towards the creek that bisects the rolling fields on the way towards Viana Castle, now burgeoned into a white-surging series of rapids by the rain.

Two soldiers wearing the king's colours are hauling a third out of the water. The wounded man groans weakly: a crossbow bolt protrudes from his arm.

"Where is Lord Borgia?" If they cannot tell him, Micheletto is ready to kill them for it--or would be, if there was time.

The oldest of them, a man already late in a soldier's life, points across the stream. "Down--down that way! He outrode--"

Spurring his horse into a jump, Micheletto sloshes across the rest of the stream with an utter lack of care for the animal. Either it stumbles and all is lost, or he does not stop for anything. The slope beyond the water is littered with scree: any rider would give it a berth.

Midway up the shifting climb, Micheletto's eyes catch a flash of steel among the thinning rain. The rhythmic pound of a horse's hooves at full speed echo from somewhere to his left. A tear of raven hair, an uncovered head, as the horse passes a broken section of the top of the climb. Even Cesare, lost in his towering temper, has circled the treacherous stretch of ground. If Micheletto can only cut straight across here, he may still stand a chance.

His mount whinnies in protest, but heeds his heels dug into its flanks. Micheletto crests the rise ahead and takes in the view in one quick, heart-stopping sweep.

Cesare's great grey horse careens at full gallop down the gorge that runs below the ridge. At the other end, at a dead angle to him, bristles a thicket of Beaumonte spears.

Micheletto cannot shoot six men in the time it will take Cesare to charge down to the cluster of soldiers. He props the matchlock against his shoulder, one hand cupped over the slow match against the spattering rain as the flame eats it up. Kneeling down, he aligns the aiming rings.

The snap of the powder going off reverberates like a thunderclap.

The beautiful Andalusian charger founders on the muddy incline, the shot tearing through its hind leg in a spurt of blood. Cesare, who has always been a consummate horseman, kicks his feet free of the stirrups and tucks his knees up. As the bulk of his mount plows into the ground, he rolls off the collapsing horse, onto his back, and then, with a cry of rage, up onto his feet.

Their surprise spoiled, the Beaumont soldiers dash forward.

Reloading the matchlock with trembling fingers that he wills to steadiness, Micheletto fires another round. It swipes across the shoulder of one attacker, burrowing into the muscles of his sword arm. Micheletto counts that as an edge, draws his sword and slides down the ridge, shouting at the top of his voice.

It becomes a tattered, desperate melee. In the first blinkered instants of confusion, Micheletto slashes through the leg of the nearest soldier before he can bring his spear to bear. The wound goes to the bone, felling the man into the yielding, sodden ground that may upset the balance of any of them.

A short horseman's lance still in his hand, Cesare pitches the heavy shaft at the first man to reach him, and misses. It entangles the Beaumonte fighter's spear for long enough that Cesare can free his sword. His opponent meets him steel for steel as they both gauge their footings.

The soldiers are five to their two, given Micheletto's opening round. A spear whips across Micheletto's chest, slicing his cuirass but leaving him unscathed. He grips his sword two-handed, needing the greater reach it allows him over drawing a dagger for defence. Never fight heedless of your own protection: he abandons that tenet at the heart of his own teachings here, wrenching a man to the ground and stomping onto his chest to aim his blade into the neck even while another strives at his exposed back.

His heart hammers fit to bursting. Any hitch in his ducks and stabs may spell his own demise.

Cesare cries out, and Micheletto plunges his blade into his opponent on naked ferocity. He leaves the blade shivering in the soldier's flank as the man splashes down into a pool of soupy muck. One hand clasped over his face, blood trickling from between his fingers, Cesare hammers his heel into the side of a soldier's knee, where his greave has come loose. On his blinded side, the last of their assailants levels his spear.

Micheletto screams, a wordless noise, terror and fury run together.

Cesare, at Micheletto's shout or some sense of his own peril, pivots barely in time for the angle of attack to be ruined. A clean thrust becomes a glancing blow. Cesare darts forward to heave the spear-haft away with his red-soaked left hand and cut the soldier down.

* * *

Micheletto presses the rag ripped from his sleeve on Cesare's face. Most of the blood flows from his scalp, but the gouge across his temple and cheek shows a wet glimpse of bone.

"This must be sewn." With the ebbing of the battle rush, anger gains ground in him. "You're a damned fool."

Cesare flinches, whether with startlement or pain. " _You_ shot my bloody horse!"

"You were racing into an ambush!" Micheletto gives him a teeth-chattering shake, for an instant ignoring his injury. "If you're trying to get killed, there are easier ways!"

"What, and you'd offer them to me?"

Micheletto leans his forehead on Cesare's good temple, not a tender contact, but a forceful chafe of skin. His hand is like a vise on the back of the other's neck.

"I would keep you alive, even if it cost me my own," he rasps. "But I am only one man, Cesare Borgia."

"I suppose you must be." Cesare closes his eyes. His breath is choppy on Micheletto's cheek. "But what else are we to do?"

"If you must die a Borgia, then..."

He is at the end of his wits. Cesare has sought something more than a few dug-in enemy guerrillas in this grey, forsaken morning.

Colours, Pascal said, colours in the air. The soul leaving the body. No, this is the opposite: being so focused on each thud of his heart against his ribs that he is unaware of all around them. Only this, only the sealed sphere of two people. Cesare's slashed face. Blood and mud rubbed into the skin. The uncounted scrapes and bruises flaring across his own body.

He would give his life. Would he give his death? The hutch is closed on all sides, and there are no passages, plain or concealed, to deliver them from this trap.

Flee, if one can. Fight, rather than kneel.

Micheletto gets piecemeal to his feet, every bone and joint wailing at the movement.

Still on his haunches, before him, Cesare speaks. "Then Cesare Borgia must die here today."

There was a time when Micheletto could peel his meaning from his slightest gesture. He moves, as he stands, with a sudden, gingerly lightness, as if he had pinned his mind onto the first nebulous shape of a plan and were testing if it held.

"The man I stabbed in the neck was close to my size." Cesare tugs at a buckle of his breastplate. "Help me out of this armour."

If Micheletto stopped to consider what they are about to do, he might catch up to himself. At Cesare's behest, he pulls the soaked leather straps through slippery metal clasps as fast as he can. The leader of the soldiers has fallen against the wall of the gorge, and his woollen cloak is largely unstained. Cesare strips it with the same unthinking efficiency that steers Micheletto's movements.

To the north are the Viana Castle defenders, to the south the camp built in the town itself. Micheletto ascends the gorge slope to find his horse, skittish and nervous, still stepping about the field of scree.

Cesare puts a point-blank shot through the head of the soldier clad in his armour, then shoulders the matchlock. Micheletto bundles the discarded pieces of the soldier's kit into his cloak and hoists them onto the horse.

The rain renews in force, pouring down upon the scattered battlefield, turning everything beyond a few feet into flowing shadows.

* * *

The castle guard, a stripling youth Micheletto has never seen before, glovers at his ragged appearance. "Repeat that?"

"Tell Her Grace that her cousin asks for a dance one more time. Then if she tells you to spit me on your spear, you can do so." He is dirty and lean from the road, his hair and beard are dull black with dye, and he takes care to stand with a stiffened spine. Changing the picture the body sketches is half any disguise.

The guard trundles off, leaving his comrade to mind Micheletto--or, to their scrutiny, a foreign horseman knocking at the gate of Castle Estense after dark. The months in Spain have bled into his accent even when he speaks the Roman dialect.

Footfalls hurry across the courtyard, accompanied by a swinging lantern. Her hair nearly glows in the fluttering illumination, no matter that it's bound in a pragmatic bun.

"Let him in. Leave us." The sonorant command in her voice is just the same, and it has the same swift effect on the guardsmen. She sets the lantern on the ground as he steps through the narrow entrance.

"My lady," Micheletto begins, the old title achingly familiar. His nascent bow is cut short when Lucrezia embraces him, road dust and stained cloak and all, her arms surprisingly strong around him.

"My friend." Her voice tangles into itself. "I am so sorry. Maybe I should be angry. I _was_ angry, when I first heard..."

To his further surprise, he rests his hands on her shoulders for a moment before pulling back. Of course she's had the news. They would have overtaken two fugitive men on an inconspicuous overland journey. "That he was dead, but there was no trace of me?"

"Yes." She stills her visage in a way that intimates too much is trapped under that collected exterior. "I _should_ be furious. But I told myself the only place you would have been was with him. That there was another explanation."

"I must ask that you come to town. There's an inn by the riverside wall. You can invent an errand tomorrow."

"If I've learned anything, it is that I shouldn't tarry when you tell me to go. I'll be a moment."

After a hasty assurance to her waiting maid and the scowling watchmen, Lucrezia emerges from the gate, leading a saddled horse. "It's useful to cultivate a few odd habits. It makes the necessary oddities more palatable. Although it's been some time since I last rode out with a hooded stranger."

"Only a short trip this time, my lady."

Laughing a muted, silvery laugh, she climbs into the saddle. " 'Lucrezia', Micheletto. Please."

"That may be a habit I cannot break, even for you." He spurs his bay gelding gently, so she can ride alongside him. "Your Grace."

"How do I not remember your being this insufferable?"

"They say time sweetens memories," he offers. Her laughter lingers on the balmy night breeze as they canter down towards the slumbering town.

* * *

Lucrezia grows apprehensive only as they near the inn: cautious rather than doubtful, her airy remarks petered out. Perhaps it's Micheletto's own air of wariness that soaks into her. He'd have preferred to stay outside town, but the risks could be handled, and they had been sleeping rough for weeks.

Neither is it great trouble to guide a demurely cloaked woman through the common room and up the stairs. Lucrezia even makes a show of setting a hand on his wrist, her face concealed by her cowl, her stance signalling exactly why she is here. A bit of civility, for a careworn gentleman long on the road.

At the top of the staircase, he says low to her, "Let me shut the door first. Say nothing. No one must know."

Micheletto closes the door behind them, turning the key and leaving it. She controls every movement she makes, perhaps down to the beating of her heart. Thus it is Cesare, coming to his feet from his seat beside the table, that closes the distance first.

He gathers her in with a deep, shivering gasp that is lost in her hair, and she winds her arms around him in a clutching clasp and kisses his temple, his nose, his scarred cheek. "Oh, my heart, my poor Cesare. Thank God and all His angels. You're alive."

All he says is, "Lucrezia," in a whisper that carries the same love and anguish as her murmured endearments. He seems to stumble. The movement staggers them both towards the chair he vacated. At last she falls into it, without ever letting go, and he buries his head against her shoulder, crouched before her, holding and being held.

Micheletto twists the key again and slinks out of the room. He finds a bench in an alcove in the smoke-stained patchwork wall where old carpentry folds into new, repaired over and over through the years.


	9. Road to Damascus

  
_I want a troublemaker for a lover,_  
 _blood-spiller, blood-drinker, a heart of flame,_  
 _who quarrels with the sky and fights with fate,_  
 _who burns like fire on the rushing sea._

\-- Rumi (tr. Zara Houshmand)

* * *

They take their leave of Ferrara a week later. Early summer is the ripest time for travel. Lucrezia devises a series of ruses, a fancy to take her air along the riverbanks outside town, or a wish to pray in a tiny downtown chapel, to let her out of the castle without fuss.

She spends most of these stolen hours with her brother, sitting with their heads together, in silence or in conversation. To Micheletto it seems that they both have found a place in the other where the rest of the world cannot intrude, and that, at this juncture, it gives them both a nebulous peace.

He does all he can to free Cesare from minding the risk of discovery. In a peculiar way, it's a return to his earliest days with the Borgia family: serving as a watchful eye over the two siblings so that they may have what time they can.

Even so, they cannot tarry, and Lucrezia's excuses will attract unwanted curiosity sooner or later.

They bid farewell on a hazy morning. The sun lies drowsy in its field of golden clouds, enough of a promise of rain in the air to gild the horizon. Lucrezia's kindness secures a smooth start for the next leg of their journey: they have provisions, even a leather-wrapped selection of maps from her library to chart their course down to the coast, past Venice, and south along the back of Italy's rugged calf. The lands to the east of the Adriatic Sea are falling under the advance of the Ottomans, and so they will linger on familiar soil until they meet the sea in the south.

They speak little in that dawn. Lucrezia draws Micheletto into an embrace that he returns fully. Cesare stands holding her for a silent, stilled time, as if he couldn't bear to let the day begin if it is to part them.

She withdraws first, kisses her brother, and turns back towards the high walls of Castle Estense before they are on the backs of their horses.

"Come," Micheletto says, gently. Cesare rounds his mount with a nudge of his heels, spurring the horse until its race is like a flight, straining to leave the road for the shining summer sky.

* * *

They cross into Neapolitan territory, the sea ever on their left. Stone towers of rough construction dot the southeastern coast. Much of the country is sparsely inhabited, and in the meek weather of young summer they maintain a good pace even without particular haste.

"Saracen towers," Cesare says. "There were beacons that were lit when the Corsairs came raiding." The road snakes past the ruined silhouette of one that was perhaps once a proper, if minute, fort, its upper windows laid out as arrow slits.

"They will return," Micheletto replies, as near to amiably as he ever does. "The stratagem that burned the fleet bought a reprieve, not peace."

"Aren't you a delight this morning." Cesare guffaws. "I'm thinking we should stop in the next bigger village we find. Living off the land loses its charm--and it's slowing us down."

Micheletto hums in affirmation--if they're careful, Cesare's suggestion carries little enough danger--then stalls his horse with a too-sharp movement. They are crossing the shallow top of a crumbling hill, upon which the Saracen tower was once built. Resilient cypresses cluster along the west-facing side.

"Get off the road. Down behind the trees. The slope drops off there."

"Why?" Even as he asks, Cesare slips down from the saddle.

"Dust cloud to the north. I want an eye on our fellow travellers before we decide to greet them."

They lead the horses down into a shaded gorge, where the broad cypress trees will hopefully shield them from scrutiny. Cesare unshoulders the matchlock, but Micheletto hands him his hunting bow instead.

"No smoke. There's no wind."

"I can't fire that lying down."

"Then we'll find you a rock to crouch behind. You are the better shot, whatever the weapon." Micheletto handles the matchlock, too, with proficiency, if not enthusiasm, while Cesare has taken to the novel weapon with his usual facility of learning.

"This from the man who fought in the Reconquista?" he quips, though he knows Micheletto only stated a fact.

"Quiet, now."

They creep up to the side of the road, where a group of fractured rocks, shrouded by waxen-leaved bushes, suggests itself for a hiding place. It is a band of seven armed men riding mules, not in uniform but all carrying some sort of weapon. Members of a local militia, Micheletto guesses from his position at the base of the rock formation. Not professional soldiers. Still, a village guard knows how to report strange faces to the lord of the castle or town.

One of the riders stops. "Hey, did you hear something?" All Micheletto can spot is a head of brown curls. A young man, judging by the bright voice.

Two steps from him, Cesare notches an arrow. It would be easy. Draw, aim, release.

"Only the wind, Tommaso. Come on, it's not as if anything moves along this path." His companion's grimace can be guessed in his tone.

"That was dramatic," Cesare breathes, the silent chuckle in his eyes.

"It damn well wasn't the wind!" Tommaso insists.

Quietly but with strength in his grasp, Micheletto takes Cesare's arm, then his shoulder, and pulls him down from the rock and into the long grasses. Somewhat to his surprise, Cesare goes still under his hand, eyes winking in reckless merriment.

"You're not mucking in the bushes over some rodent that's chittering in your ear," the second man says. "Move, son."

A mule neighs; one of the men coughs. The rap of tack and the dull plod of the mules recede down the road. The brushes droop down in a screen of welcome concealment, but they also obscure any lines of sight onto the road unless they brave the rocks again. They lie shin to thigh, forearm to chest, Cesare's breath on Micheletto's neck as he cranes it to catch a last glimpse of the riders. An innocuous encounter, in the end. His breath comes shorter and sharper all the same. A root of suspicion dug too deep to be pulled.

He glances down at Cesare then.

"I dread to think about your precautions if we ever run into actual guards." Cesare quirks a brow, touching the flat of his fingers to Micheletto's mouth. " 'Get off the road'." He lowers his voice to Micheletto's unvarnished timbre. " 'Dig a ditch, we'll hide the horses'."

"We'll... find ourselves riddled with arrows yet if you keep up the noise." The words slip from him in snippets. The taut alertness is shifting into a different sentiment, part indignation, part relief, part _Cesare_ , who runs that light, calloused hand over his jaw and throat.

"I'd count that a good death." Cesare laughs. He shoves at Micheletto like a rough-housing youth, hands splayed across his shoulders.

Twisting in place, Micheletto raises himself up, wrenches to the side and pinions Cesare again. Broken grass stalks peek from the dark nest of his hair, but his laughter never ceases.

"I would have you alive," Micheletto grumbles, drowning the abrupt, thick ache in his throat into Cesare, pressed into his body. "If I have to muffle you myself."

"You may need to silence me then."

Cesare drags his head down even as he bends it down. Their mouths meet in a near-violent slant, the kiss more like a bite, hungry and tangling.

* * *

They manage a clandestine detour to a sizable fishing village, to procure a few civilised comforts. Micheletto has taken charge of their coin, as Cesare has a somewhat sketchy view of the values of smaller sums and what one should receive for a single Venetian ducat.

At dusk they come to a deserted farmstead nestled between the rocky hills. The building must be a hundred years old if it is a day, though the remainder of the roof intimates a more recent occupation. What matters to them is that the stone chimney works. They make a fire in the old hearth and scrounge a pair of chairs from the side room that has escaped the elements.

"I hear you are, among your other exploits, a veteran of the Reconquista." Cesare sprawls, as agreeably as he can given that the chair he sits in only has three good legs. "Such stories you told my sister. I ought to be jealous."

"She worked it out by herself." Micheletto takes a small chunk of beeswax from among his tools and begins rubbing it on a new bowstring. "You never asked."

"Tell me."

"Not tonight." Tonight is easy, both of them tired but on the better side of weariness, after a ride just long enough. "Few of them are tales for whittling away an evening."

Cesare hums. "But they are your tales."

"Some day," Micheletto amends, if only to assuage the subtle undercurrent of dejection in Cesare's bearing.

"Well, if you won't speak of yesterday, will tomorrow do?" Cesare fetches the leather bag, oiled to repel water and dirt, that holds their sheaf of maps. "We still have a ways to go. A ship to find. We are not stopping in Italy, no?"

"It would not be prudent, even if you keep the scar." The ragged cut does change Cesare's visage, pulling the healing skin closer over the cheekbone. His shorter hair makes him shed some of his years, and his expressions still dance fleeting and free across his face.

Cesare spreads open the first one, a rare, printed chart that Lucrezia had acquired at significant expense in Venice. As carefree as he seems in his questions, he handles the thick, folded paper with meticulous care.

"Rhodes, perhaps?" He taps the shape of the island in the span of the Mediterranean. "I could see how my Hospitaller impression is faring."

"And the knights would bore us to death with penitence and virtue within the week."

"All right," Cesare says. "Would something further to the east suit you better? Old Constantinople? Jerusalem? We won't avoid Saracen lands that way, though."

"I'll sooner take the Moors than the Spanish," Micheletto ripostes.

"That opens up a host of possibilities." Cesare bites back laughter. "You might make an excellent Corsair."

"I'd rather walk to the edges of that map of yours than live aboard a ship." Micheletto finishes treating the bowstring, looping it back around one end of the stave.

"You're a hard man to please." Cesare's hand trails a forlorn curve in the air. "So, Saracens, and overland. Damascus? You've never been _there_ , at least."

"No," Micheletto says. Cesare has made the matter into a game, but there is a real concern layered in his jesting suggestions. Two men of their talents can always sell their swords, and they've long since agreed that mercenary work is their likeliest choice.

But no wars, Micheletto told Cesare, on the way to Ferrara.

No wars, Cesare agreed after a strained moment of rumination.

"Tell me of Damascus, then." He sets aside his task and leans forward.

"Tell you?" Cesare shrugs. "I could tell you a story, one of Lucrezia's fairytales. I've never been anywhere close. I expect it is a city of men, and women." His voice softens a notch. "Whatever languages they speak or whichever god they worship."

"Men are men," Micheletto says. "In Italy, France and Spain, so why not in the east?"

"Damascus it is." Cesare tilts back in the rickety chair until his outstretched feet almost touch the still-glowing embers."We'll cast our fortunes and see where they fall."

Micheletto nods, letting his eyes dwell, glorying in the drowsy truth of Cesare there.

They speak of other things then, a word dropped here and there as their lassitude slips down towards weariness. Late in the night, their coupling is heavy and languorous, lingering as the red of the fire lingers along the ramshackle rafters.

They rise before dawn and rustle out of the house to saddle their horses, sheltered in the overgrown, enclosed yard. The meandering promontory carries them, two lonesome riders, down towards the cerulean curve of the Mediterranean.

* * *

  
_When you love you should not say,_  
 _"God is in my heart," but rather,_  
 _"I am in the heart of God."_

_And think not you can direct the course of love,_  
 _for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course._

\-- Kahlil Gibran  


**Author's Note:**

> I owe thanks to gentlezombie for co-conspiring the original idea with me, to Umbralpilot for the glorious word wars and to AntigravityDevice for being a friend in need and my last-minute betareading hero.


End file.
